On the Issue of Aid

[bcholmes]

A letter I sent to the New Internationalist tonight:

Last October, I had some down time and sat down to catch up on some of the back issues of New Internationalist that had been piling up. Your article on aid in the September, 2009, issue really stood out as something I was interesting in commenting on. But I didn't get around to it. Partially because it was already a whole month after the issue had come out -- I read the October issue the same day and figured that I'd missed my opportunity to be timely.

I've decided to write this, now, all these months later, because many of the points I wanted to talk through were items that I came to understand while working on Haiti activism, and given the recent events in Haiti, I feel those points are topical again.

(As an aside: I know that your magazine can't be everything to everybody, but I've hoped for some time to see some coverage on Haiti in your magazine. I hope that the recent earthquake might encourage you to spotlight this country in the near future. Lack of awareness of what's going on in the country is one of the things that allows foreign powers to continue to push an unwelcome neoliberal agenda there).

Your articles, "Boon or burden" and "The Case for Real Aid" are both written around a central dialogue: is aid good or is aid bad? I don't work with any aid agency, and so my question is far more basic. It's this, really: why do we call some of this stuff aid?

To clarify my question with some examples, Terry Buss's book, Haiti in the Balance notes that although aid to Haiti rose by $1.3 billion from 2005 to 2006, some of the money recorded as aid was used for some odd purposes. For example, "the money paid for U.S. Coast Guard interdiction of Haitian refugees, refugee support, drug trafficking curtailment, and military expenditures" was included in that sum.

To use a more personal example, eight days before the earthquake hit Haiti, I was visiting Ronald Dauphin in the prison in Port-au-Prince. Mr. Dauphin has the unfortunate distinction of being Haiti's longest-serving prisoner who has never been sentenced. Arrested on March 1st, 2004, his case has been stuck in legal limbo for years.

His arrest relates directly to "aid" provided by Canada to Haiti. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA -- our equivalent of USAID) funded a human rights group called NCHR-Haiti, which produced documentation of a massacre in La Scierie, which was used as the pretext to arrest Mr. Dauphin and others, including the then-Prime Minister of Haiti, Yvon Neptune.

At the time, several legitimate human rights groups (who did not have the capacity to assess the situation in Haiti) repeated NCHR-Haiti's claims. But as a result of Prime Minister Neptune's trial, it's become clear that NCHR-Haiti's claims aren't credible. The Inter-American court and respected human rights groups such as Amnesty International have stated, quite baldly, that the allegations are entirely politically motivated. The allegations were created to provide a pretext for removing a sitting government at the time of the 2004 coup against President Aristide.

The problem is that Mr. Dauphin is still in jail because of those allegations, regardless of the fact that they've been roundly debunked.

In response to a letter-writing campaign on Mr. Dauphin's behalf, Canadian Minister of State of Foreign Affairs (Americas), Peter Kent sent me a form letter assuring me that Canadian aid was now busy reforming the justice system in Haiti so that Haiti's many prisoners can get out of the legal limbo they find themselves stuck in. In essence, he was telling me that the same apparatus that was responsible for his arrest, responsible for the destabilization of the government, was now busy coming to his rescue. I'd be lying if I said that that response reassured me.

In your aid debate, the conclusion seemed to be that Moyo's critique of aid should be disregarded because it comes from this right-wing, neo-con space that fails to acknowledge that aid isn't the issue -- it's the citizenry that must effect real change. I think that's a bit off the mark because I think that, in the case of Haiti, aid is frequently used to prevent the citizenry from taking the driving seat. I think there's a legitimate leftist critique of aid on this kind of basis.

I think that the question, "is aid good or bad?" is a distraction from the real question: "how do we, as citizens of a country, evaluate whether or not our government aid to a country is being used for reasonable purposes?" Because it seems that so long as governments stick the label "aid" on anything -- whether supporting bogus human rights groups or Coast Guard interdiction of refugees -- we nod our heads and assume that it's all okay. To me, that looks like complicity, and the kind of conversation that emerges solely in reaction to a neocon like Moyo is part of the problem.

My goal has not been to send a letter to the Letters page. I was interested in sending a letter to the editors. In the coming months, as more and more is said about Haiti (whether about the failures of the disaster relief effort, or the problems of the last six years of intervention on the part of Canada, the US and France) I am hoping that the New Internationalist will tackle some of these topics head-on.

Thank you for your time,

BC Holmes
Toronto, Canada

Comments

[beable]

This is a most excellent letter.