Will charity scandals starve aid donations?

Recent questionmarks about the use of charity funds, including allegations famine relief money was spent on weapons, have led to a furious response from Bob Geldof and others worried such claims will be exploited to cut aid, writes MARY FITZGERALD

IT IS DIFFICULT to overstate the impact of Band Aid. Twenty-five years after Bob Geldof’s campaign raised millions to help victims of the famine then devastating Ethiopia, it continues to cast a long shadow. Development experts may argue over what kind of legacy Band Aid/Live Aid left behind in Ethiopia and in the wider aid sphere, but few dispute its role in raising public awareness of the possibilities of humanitarian assistance.

It is hardly surprising then that a report in March on the BBC World Service programme, Assignment, claiming that 95 per cent of aid money sent to the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia in 1985 was diverted by rebels to buy weapons, has proved so controversial.

Much of the furore stems from subsequent media reports which gave the erroneous impression that most of the funds raised by Band Aid had been siphoned off. The BBC report hinges on aid money dispersed in rebel-held Tigray by several different charities.

In interviews with the Africa editor at BBC World Service, Martin Plaut, two former leaders of the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – then battling the Soviet-backed dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam – alleged their comrades had posed as merchants to dupe aid agencies into handing over large sums of cash, purportedly to buy food.

The report, which was broadcast last month, also cited recently released CIA documents and quoted a senior US diplomat as saying there was a belief at the time that aid was “almost certainly being diverted for military purposes”.

Bob Geldof angrily rejected the BBC report, saying “the story and the figures just don’t add up”. If such a huge percentage of the aid money had been diverted, he argued, far more than one million people would have died. Between 1985 and 1991 Band Aid’s total spend in the Tigray region amounted to $11 million of the $100 million raised.

“It’s possible that in one of the worst, longest-running conflicts on the continent, some money was mislaid. But to suggest it was on this scale is just bollocks,” Geldof told a British newspaper.

Oxfam described the BBC report as “palpable nonsense”, while Christian Aid dismissed it as “outrageous and very damaging”.

Trócaire was one of several aid agencies at the time to channel funds through the Relief Society of Tigray, the “humanitarian wing” of the TPLF, which is at the centre of the BBC report allegations. But Trócaire director Justin Kilcullen is satisfied the money donated to Trócaire “went where it was supposed to go” and helped thousands of people to stay alive.

“The vast majority of all our funds went on food and was monitored carefully,” he says. “There was no evidence to suggest that any money was being misused, despite the fact we were working in the middle of a conflict zone.”

The BBC report has prompted Bob Geldof to voice wider concerns that claims of massive aid diversion could undermine the public’s faith in the effectiveness of humanitarian assistance. He said it would be a “fucking tragedy” if people stopped giving to charity because of such allegations. Geldof also argued that the report is likely to be exploited by those who want to cut aid.

The episode raises several questions about the dilemmas faced by aid agencies working in challenging environments, especially in situations which require negotiating through the fog of war to ensure aid gets to those in greatest need.

Donors and agencies now have rigorous systems in place to monitor aid delivery and to ensure the diversion of funds is kept to a minimum. Even so, it is an unpalatable fact that a certain amount of aid money is likely to end up in the pockets of people other than the intended recipients.

“In any aid operation, you work on the basis that 10 per cent of aid will go astray,” Myles Wickstead, a former British ambassador to Ethiopia, says. “It’s the price you pay for getting the 90 per cent through. Where lives are at stake you cut corners and take risks. You make judgments. But I’d give no credibility whatsoever to the idea that 95 per cent of aid to Tigray was diverted. It was too highly monitored, most particularly that of Live Aid. Some money may well have gone astray in Ethiopia in 1985. But nowhere near on the scale which the BBC has alleged.”

The challenge, says Fr Jack Finucane, who co-founded Concern, Ireland’s largest development agency, is to find ways to counter corruption while still reaching those in need. Finucane, who was on the ground in southern Ethiopia during the 1984-85 famine, remembers suspicions among the humanitarian community at the time that some aid money had gone astray elsewhere in the country.

“There is always a danger that some aid will be siphoned off . . . It will always be an issue,” he says. “You suspect it is going to happen to some degree, so you take all sorts of measures possible to ensure it happens to a very small degree.”

Finucane recalls several of the major humanitarian crises of recent decades, including those in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Somalia, and Sudan. “All these governments were totally corrupt. You could not trust them in any way. You’re in a dilemma,” he says. “What do you do? Do you continue working there or do you say it is impossible and leave? Our position always was that we will try to work with the people who are the most marginalised, the people who need help most.”

Agencies such as Concern and Trócaire say they take great care in monitoring projects and rooting out corruption.

“ keep strong control over finances and donations,” says Justin Kilcullen. “For instance, in Afghanistan, when a former employee took a sum of money from Trócaire’s office, we tracked him to Pakistan and took up the case with the authorities there to claim it back. We don’t tolerate corruption in any form. We don’t engage in bribery to get things done and where we do find local instances of corruption, we pursue them relentlessly.”

Back in Ethiopia, as in several other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the issue of manipulating aid has not gone away. The TPLF rebels, some of whom are alleged to have bought guns and bullets with diverted aid money in the 1980s, eventually succeeded in ousting the brutal Mengistu regime and have run Ethiopia since 1991. The country’s prime minister, former rebel leader Meles Zenawi, has been accused of using food aid as a political tool to buy support before elections due to take place next month. Human rights groups and rival political groups say food and other aid has been withheld from opposition supporters.

During an interview with The Irish Times in January, Meles responded to these claims by questioning the motives of those making the allegations. “Given the fact that there are several hundred thousand people involved in the distribution of food aid, I cannot say that not a single one of them has unfairly discriminated,” he said. “People are trying to make political capital out of this.”

Last month the Band Aid Trust stated it would report BBC World Service to the British broadcasting watchdog Ofcom and the corporation’s governing body, the BBC Trust. Whatever the outcome of that action, the controversy has already firmly lodged itself in the long-running and often rancorous debate about the pros and cons of aid.

Ireland Has A Big Heart At Times Of Crisis

IRELAND HAS long been considered one of the most generous countries when it comes to overseas aid.

The public response to the developing world, particularly at times of great crisis, has always been impressive.

When the recession hit and some politicians began muttering that charity begins at home, many in the development sector wondered what kind of impact such poor economic circumstances would have on the public's willingness to give. In 2009, Concern calculated that public donations had dropped by 12 per cent from 2008. Trócaire says its income from the public has fallen by 10 per cent in the past year.

It might seem obvious to attribute that decline to belt-tightening, but some in the sector say media coverage also plays a part. The fact that, in the past four years, no major humanitarian emergency had caught the attention of the media is believed to have been a factor in declining public revenues. Haiti changed all that.

Dóchas, which represents development agencies in Ireland, says over €24m has been raised by Irish NGOs for Haiti. "We were overwhelmed by the response," says Richard Dixon, Concern's director of fund-raising. "We were humbled by it."

While Bob Geldof has fretted about the damage caused by a recent report claiming aid money had been siphoned off by rebels in northern Ethiopia in 1985, Ireland's aid agencies are less concerned. "It contributes to the debate about aid and the impact of aid," says Richard Dixon. "That debate is healthy."

Trócaire director Justin Kilcullen agrees: "People trust Trócaire to spend their money wisely and we do exactly that."