From our newly-published blog post for the New York Review of Books:
Foreign aid observers have often worried that Western aid to Africa is propping up autocratic regimes. Yet seldom has such a direct link from aid to political repression been demonstrated as in “Development without Freedom,” an extensively documented new report on Ethiopia by Human Rights Watch. Based on interviews with 200 people in 53 villages and cities throughout the country, the report concludes that the Ethiopian government, headed by prime minister Meles Zenawi, uses aid as a political weapon to discriminate against non-party members and punish dissenters, sending the population the draconian message that “survival depends on political loyalty to the state and the ruling party.”
The aid agencies say their own investigations fail to find widespread evidence of the misdeeds that the report documents—withholding government-provided seeds, fertilizer and microloans from non-party members, barring suspected critics of the regime from food for work programs, and denying emergency food aid to women, children and the elderly for refusal to join the ruling party. However, some aid officials admitted to Human Rights Watch (HRW) knowing about them:
As one western donor official said, “Every tool at [the government’s] disposal—fertilizer, loans, safety net—is being used to crush the opposition. We know this.”
Our post concludes by suggesting ways that the aid community might help Ethiopians rather than their rulers.
We of course welcome alternative views, including criticisms of the HRW report and HRW’s operations in Ethiopia.
11 Comments
This is so true. As President Barack Obama said in Indonesia recently, ‘Development without freedom is also poverty’. Many tyrannical states are using the development first slogan to crush opposition and even to carry out demographic changing – ethnic cleansing activities under guise in states like Sri Lanka.
As advocates of the ‘Asian value’ theory to put ‘food on the table first before freedom’ has now found an increasingly powerful global backer – China, nation states like Sri Lanka and Myanmar are able to continue their oppressive ways.
It is becoming increasingly essential to hold the leaders of these states accountable for crimes against humanity. If international law is weak to brng justice, ways to strengthen it is now paramount, along with finding ways to prevent brutal subjugation of the masses.
First, the usual self-reminder that aid remains mainly a foreign policy instrument and a source of employment/money for the aid industry. And of course these don’t have much incentive to change aid policy on Ethiopia.
Nevertheless, development aid policy has on the margin undergone reforms over the past few decades. For example, the transparency/accountability drive.
I think that to the extent we can, we should advocate that the next reform should be the ‘moral accountability’.
This means that donors have to take moral responsibility for all the actions of governments they give money to. That means that we should donors directly responsible for, for example, all the arbitrary arrests and murders that the Ethiopian government has carried out for two decades. It means that every time somebody is beaten up or arrested, we no longer just blame the Ethiopian government, but the donors as well.
Note that this does not mean that aid in Ethiopia is not being used for ‘good’. Sure it is. Aid has many benefits, which its supporters outline very well. However, it also has its costs, and just as, or perhaps more so as aid advocates claim the benefits, they have to claim the costs. They have to be made to say – ‘My money has increased primary school enrollment and my money killed 200 demonstrators in 2005′. Etc.
So there you go – ‘moral accountability’. (Or a better slogan if you can come up with it.)
See work of Kevin Morrison at Cornell on how regimes use aid and non-tax (oil) money for regime stability, irrespective of regime type.
The Holistic (with capital H) view of development urges donors to work on a all-encompassing plan and to make compromises in the process. if donors would see development more as a set of unrelated goals, they could search for the best partner for each of them. For health and education, this might be the government, while for food for work it might be the WFP or the private sector. For democracy, it would rather strengthen checks and balances.
I don’t have too much doubt about HRW’s core finding that aid delivery was at least partially driven by political concerns, but their methodology leaves a lot to be desired.
HRW’s study of Ethiopia disappoints although it doesn’t surprise. But, at least according to José De Córdoba’s Nov. 12 report in The Wall Street Journal, “Aid Spawns Backlash in Haiti,” aid agencies sustain a much less conventional yet likewise unhealthy relationship with Haiti’s government. He writes that by “building a parallel state that is more powerful than Haiti’s own government, aid groups are ensuring Haiti never develops and remains dependent on charities.” Córdoba cites the claim by Jean Palerme Mathurin, economic adviser to Prime Minister Bellerive, that the NGO presence has “infantilized” Haiti, as well as the assertion by Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health that “NGOs have flourished in number and size as the public sector has withered.”
Bill–
I’m surprised that you seem to be taking a fairly absolutist view on aid to non democratic regimes. These situations are rarely as black and white as you present them to be, and the evidence that the aid being provided is not reaching the poor is not as strong as you claim. Cutting off aid to a regime entirely inevitably hurts some poor people who were benefiting from it. Moreover, the evidence that cutting off aid makes tyrants less tyrannical is very weak. Meles is no democrat, but he is certainly a lot better than his predecessors. The same is true of Kagame who has improved the quality of life significantly in Rwanda even if he stifles public discourse. I certainly agree that donors need to make every effort to ensure their aid is not used to suppress people and to reach people in need. Ensuring that sometimes requires donors to place conditions on aid that leave them open to aid critics for their neocolonialism. But these situations are highly contextual and an aid cutoff should only occur when it is clear the aid contributions are contributing to significant harm with no benefit to the poor in the recipient country. That is the argument I thought you made for arguing against the US taking away AGOA status from Madagascar after a DJ provoked street fighting and overthrew a democratically elected regime.
AID and AGOA are not the same. In Madagascar all but humanitarian aid was cut off post coup d’etat. AGOA privileges, which are linked to democracy efforts by its charter, were canceled with serious consequences to the population and very little direct impact on the coup leaders. If aid is an adjunct to foreign policy (seems to be after listening to Ms Clinton and recent announcements from the UK while France seems to have had this as policy since 1960.) then you cant just offer a carrot. If you say there is a consequence to bad behavior then you had best present the stick or never be taken seriously. Canceling AGOA did nothing to change the coup government but it did show constancy and resolve in policy. [Is that important? Probably a good subject for another blog.]
Canceling direct aid and budget support had a much larger affect on coup incomes and ability to distribute benefits. No diversion of aid funds and no patronage to coup supporters. Almost unnoticed is the change in US aid to program support of INGOs. US development funding is running at record levels but is not going to the government but to (mostly US) NGOs to implement the programs formerly managed and funded by government using donor funds.
Coups may somewhere be staged by idealists but the root causes of the Madagascar coup were money and power. Those who had run the country for 28 years were out and they wanted their privileges back. They didnt want an open economy and they especially didnt want new non francophone economic players upsetting their feudal power structure. The new powerful Chinese presence is an unintended consequence and will impact the economic elite in ways they cannot yet imagine even while they profit enormously in the short term.
http://news.mongabay.com/2010/1105-rajoelina_eia_video.html
Elimination of aid to the coup government has not made it more reasonable or likely to reintroduce democracy. They have instead sought alternative avenues for their enrichment. One day, probably shortly, there will not be enough spoils to go around and the transitional authority will splinter and try to divide up the golden goose. Sharing the quack or the beak wont satisfy some marginalized coup members and then there will be another, this time internal, coup.
Dont expect the Malagasy crisis to end anytime soon. Dont expect the aid tap to be turned back on and dont expect economic growth this decade. A former post here states Madagascar had 0.8% negative growth from 1960 to 2008. That curve seems unlikely to change direction, probably ever.
I am not familiar with what’s happened in Madagascar, but from <a href="http://aidwatchers.com/2010/11/is-aid-sometimes-for-ruling-party-members-only/#comment-21789"the above comment, I found the following interesting:
“Elimination of aid to the coup government has not made it more reasonable or likely to reintroduce democracy.”
Even if this is true, and that’s a big IF, at least we in the West (or the USA in this case) will no longer bear some responsibility for the government’s repression. That’s important.
Last night (Nov 17) a group of army officers at a base near the international airport announced the dissolution of the High Transitional Authority, the coup government of Madagascar, and its replacement by a military directorate.
These same officers were the power behind the original coup in 2009 but had been marginalized recently. Not clear this morning if the new coup will take.
I had a post recently about something similar in Ghana. The government gave fertilizer vouchers to districts where it lost in the last election, presumably in the hope of winning them the next time. If these are aid-financed vouchers – and depending on your beliefs about fungibility, that could be very difficult to prove – that could be another case of aid being used to shore up the government’s support.
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