Does Helping Really Help?

By Otto Friedrich

Am I my brother's keeper? God answered Cain's evasive question by putting him under an eternal curse, and so the traditional answer has been a cautious affirmative. But what if my brother already has a keeper, one who has a gun and who claims the right to decide whether my brother will get any of the food I send him?

That is more or less the question that bedevils Western officials as they face the horrors of another famine in the Ethiopia of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. All too clear in the public memory are those televised pictures from 1984-85 of starving children with their matchstick arms, their swollen bellies and their huge, staring eyes. The public may also remember reports of relief shipments being taxed $50 a ton to help finance Mengistu's 225,000-man army, the largest in black Africa, and of sacks of Western grain rotting on the docks or disappearing into the black market.

As if Mengistu's tyranny were not bad enough, the secessionist rebels in famine-threatened Eritrea are now showing that they too can and will interfere with United Nations food shipments. Says Manuel Pietri of the Paris-based International Aid Against Hunger: "There is a perverse game between the government and the rebels to make aid not work, unless, of course, they can turn it to their own advantage." But the stronger of the two parties, Mengistu's government, is the source of most of the trouble. Says an aid official in Washington: "I'll tell you what the government's three priorities are: fighting the rebels, fighting the rebels and fighting the rebels." Comments a colleague: "The Ethiopian government has the worst human rights record in Africa."

This sense of Ethiopia as a bottomless sinkhole for Western aid inspires some skeptical experts to wonder whether such assistance is really wise. Regular international rescue efforts do little to encourage recipients to learn to feed themselves, the skeptics argue, and a tougher approach just might force Ethiopia to mend its ways. "What will aid do?" asked Britain's Economist last month. "It will strengthen the dominion of Ethiopia's ignorant rulers. The weather is the only calamity not directly caused by Colonel Mengistu . . . and his cronies. Their Russian advisers have taught them to run vast state farms that produce no food. Imitating Stalin's anti-kulak terror, they have shot 'hoarders and saboteurs' prudent enough to store grain . . . Help for the starving may make some of them suffer more, and reinforce the grip of the government that caused them to starve. Yet something must be done."

But what? "The aid Ethiopians need is diplomatic pressure, not food," says Rony Brauman of Doctors Without Borders, a French charitable organization that was expelled from Ethiopia two years ago for criticizing Mengistu's brutally handled program to resettle residents of rebel-threatened areas. "If we have a duty, it is to pressure the government to change its policies. Otherwise, in two or three years, we're going to see the same bodies, the same TV footage, the same appeals from humanitarian agencies to come to the rescue." But as a French government official asks, "Who is going to take the responsibility for saying 'All right, now we're going to stop all aid. Finished. Not one more sack of flour'? At that point, you've reached the political and moral limits of the debate."

What must be done, according to U.S. Congressmen Toby Roth, a Wisconsin Republican, and William H. Gray III, a Pennsylvania Democrat, is to put economic pressure on the Mengistu regime until it stops violating the basic human and civil rights of its people. Last January they introduced a bill, now co-sponsored by 81 other Congressmen, that would prohibit all U.S. loans and new private investments in Ethiopia and would ban all imports of the country's coffee, its main export. "Ethiopia is a stench in the nostrils of humanity," says Roth. "We are not going to stop humanitarian aid. There are people starving, and we want to help those people. But we don't want to help Mengistu. We are in a dilemma. It is like trying to pick up a porcupine."

The Roth-Gray legislation has been introduced several times before, however, and it has not come close to passing. Others in Congress wonder how making Ethiopia even more impoverished would help its starving masses. Nor is there much chance that such pressure would make the authoritarian Mengistu modify his tactics. "If we were simply to fold our hands and say, 'Well, we'll allow 6, 7, 8 million people to die,' I don't know that there is any evidence that that would change their agricultural policy," says Jay F. Morris, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). "For most governments, to lose a million of their citizens would generally force some sort of change in policy, but it didn't there. So I would argue that the withdrawal of our assistance would probably doom more innocents to a meaningless death . . . Given our American tradition of providing help, it would be barbaric for us to turn our backs."

The idea that governments have a moral obligation to feed the inhabitants of other countries is a relatively recent notion. For centuries, hunger was a major weapon of war. Starvation was taken for granted during the great sieges of the Middle Ages and the religious wars of early modern times. Victims of 19th century famines in Ireland and Russia were encouraged to emigrate elsewhere. Charity was basically a responsibility of the church, or of no one.

When Britain blockaded the German coast during World War I, it was considered somewhat quixotic for a young U.S. official named Herbert Hoover to organize a relief program that fed 10 million civilians in German-occupied Belgium. Early in World War II, when Germany once more occupied Belgium and Britain again blockaded the coast, the then neutral U.S. considered renewing its Belgian relief -- until Winston Churchill adamantly forbade it.

In the half-century since then, feeding the world's hungry has become an accepted part of Western foreign policy, sometimes for political gain but often as an end in itself. Many people consider it morally wrong not to give food to poorer countries when the West has so much of it, especially in this year of near record U.S. farm output and a growing West European food glut. "If there is any politics in what we are doing," says Frederick Machmer, U.S. AID chief in Addis Ababa, "it is the fact that the U.S. public would be very angry if we didn't give food aid to the Ethiopians." To Brother Gus, an Irish missionary who works in Addis Ababa, the matter is simple. "If you can stomach thousands of children dying for lack of food because you don't like the government, that is your problem," he says. "My problem is to try to feed them all, children, the parents, the aged, the young, wherever they may be."

Despite the criticisms of Mengistu's regime, some of his heavy-handed policies appear to have rationales behind them. It is true, of course, that rebellious Eritrea, governed as an Italian colony from 1890 until World War II, has a tribal makeup different from the rest of Ethiopia. Yet the country as a whole contains more than 80 distinct ethnic groups, and poverty-stricken Eritrea could hardly survive as an independent entity. It is also likely that Mengistu's motives for forcibly transporting 600,000 peasants from Eritrea and neighboring Tigre to the less populated southern part of the country were more political than humanitarian. Nonetheless, a number of Western experts have agreed that those parched and eroded northern provinces cannot support their inhabitants as well as the more fertile south.

Similar reasoning applies to Mengistu's much criticized policy of "villagization," which coerces peasants to move from their scattered farms into village collectives. "What makes developing countries really backward is their inability to benefit from modern science and technology," Mengistu told TIME in an interview last year. "People live in isolation on hilltops . . . It is only when you have peasants together in villages that they can benefit from . . . technology to combat difficult conditions."

Though Mengistu is widely blamed for the disaster, the series of famines actually began in 1973, under the inept and autocratic Emperor Haile Selassie. Far from seeking help, the Ethiopian government in the 1970s strenuously denied that any famine existed, and U.N. officials diplomatically remained silent about the tragedy.

Some reputable outside observers think criticism of the Mengistu regime has been exaggerated. One of them is Father Thomas Fitzpatrick, director of Caritas International, the Rome-based Catholic emergency-aid organization. "There was not massive corruption or diversion during the 1984 famine," says Fitzpatrick, an American who supervised Catholic aid in Ethiopia at the time. "There weren't distribution foul-ups to the extent that has been reported. It's true that some ships were backed up in the harbors. True, it rained once unexpectedly, and some grain was exposed and began to rot. But no more than 3% of all the aid that went through our hands went to waste." Even if the complaints about Mengistu were true, Fitzpatrick adds, "to the extent that food given to a country saves the government of that country the foreign exchange it would have to spend on that food -- O.K., food aid helps support that government. But you have to ask, 'Without food aid, would the government spend less on its war effort, or would it let these people starve?' "

To Mengistu's critics, all such defenses are simply evidence that those who want to provide aid become prisoners of the system: anyone who faults the dictator risks being expelled, like France's Doctors Without Borders. "We have to be discreet," concedes Frank Conlon, Africa program director for Lutheran World Relief. "In relief situations, you often don't have a lot of time for dialogue." Says Laura Kullenberg, director of the Horn of Africa program run by Oxfam America: "This is a life-and-death situation, and our choices are limited. Our mission is to make sure food gets to people in need, not to make a political point."

U.S. officials estimate that there is now enough food committed to Ethiopia to last until spring, but whether it gets out of the warehouses and to the hungry depends heavily on the available transportation. Relief officials estimate they need nearly 300 additional trucks to haul food from distribution centers to rural areas, but the Mengistu regime has thus far provided only 100. So welfare officials are falling back on a vastly expensive airlift. It is notable that the Soviets, who sell Mengistu most of his weapons, have sent very little in the way of either food or transport.

"What will we in the West do?" observes Pietri of International Aid Against Hunger. "We will end by choosing the most costly, screwed-up solution that benefits the least amount of people, and we'll do it in a spectacular way." But just how much real choice is there? "The ethic is an absolute one," says Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, a New York-based institute that studies moral issues. "The price of not providing aid is a basic denial of humanity, far greater than the possible political damage. It may indeed help a corrupt and totalitarian regime, but you cannot ignore the fundamental necessity of life." So as the West wonders whether it should bail out that infuriating regime once again, the answer appears to be unpleasant but nonetheless unavoidable: yes, because everyone is his brother's keeper when that brother is starving.

With reporting by Alastair Matheson/Nairobi and Tala Skari/Paris