As Two Aid Workers in Sudan Face Death - the True Tragedy of Aid

It was reported yesterday that two female aid workers kidnapped from their Sudanese compound on 4th April may be murdered if the demands of the militia holding them are not met.

Stephanie Joidon is Canadian and her colleague Claire Dubois is French. They work for the international aid organisation Aide Medicale Internationale.

A spokesman for the kidnappers named the gang as the 'Falcons for the Liberation of Africa', and stated that if six French aid workers accused of abducting children in Chad in the so-called 'Zoe's Ark' case were not re-tried, then the two hostages may come to harm.

The BBC has more:

One of the men told Reuters news agency by telephone: "We demand France open the case of the Zoe's Ark criminals and judge them through a fair court.

"If the French government is not serious in negotiations with us and does not respond to our request, we will kill the two aid workers."

In 2007, six employees of French humanitarian group Zoe's Ark were convicted of trying to fly more than 100 children out of Chad to Europe without authorisation.

The group, who denied the charges, were sentenced to eight years of hard labour by a Chadian court, but were pardoned in March 2008 by Chad's president.

The kidnappers allowed one of their captives to speak to media by satellite telephone on Sunday.

Ms Joidon told AFP news agency: "We are being treated well. We do not know where we are. We wish [our families] much courage. We hope that all ends well."

I think cases such as this put a lot into perspective - just what were these women doing in one of the most dangerous countries on earth?

I understand that most aid volunteers are humanitarians who just want to help, butI feel the aid industry has simply become a destructive cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The unfortunate situation in most parts of Africa will not improve with interference; people must be left to their own devices to find out what works for them, to learn from their own mistakes.

The constant safety net of aid and international intervention simply exacerbates the problem, because it is in itself based on a kind of casual racism; it is based on the idea that some people are incapable of helping themselves and must be treated like children, or cannot be expected to achieve certain standards.

The 'Falcons for the Liberation of Africa' are probably just Sudanese Islamists making mischief due to the arrest warrant issued for Omar al-Bashir - they probably don't realise just how true some of their words ring.

Assuming for a moment that the motives of this group are pure, why would some Africans want to be 'liberated' from free food, free money and instantly being absolved of all blame for their own problems and failings?

Could it be because all of these things sound good on the surface, but are actually an anathema to human development?

Sometimes, you genuinely need to be cruel to be kind. As far as I can tell, 90% of the Third World aid industry is based around a perpetual cycle - keeping directors employed, making government ministers feel useful and benevolent, generating huge sums of money which are often wasted just to help individuals and fundraisers feel good, and massaging celebrity egos.

All of this is hugely counterproductive, as the tragedy which is Africa proves. It is simply not sustainable to maintain the population levels of an entire continent on charity - it is a sick experiment, and in many respects the ultimate example of Western superiority complexes and what would have once been called the 'white man's burden' - the need to dominate and control and dictate what's best which the Left deride so much.

This isn't the iron fist version, that's all - it's a sickly, suffocating blanket of love and hope and kindness.

Both kill, however. As the world's population exceeds the capacity of the planet to support it, supplying huge amounts of food aid will become increasingly untenable - then millions will suffer and die, millions more than if the population levels had been allowed to correct themselves to the suitability of their environment in the first place.

That's a true tragedy, and a purely man-made one.

A Response on Galloway

A contributor called 'dwillsworth' who blogs over at 'In Ruins' recently responded to a comment I left on his blog with a full length post.

The issue in question is whether or not George Galloway actually defended Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, and whether or not the latter individual counts as a 'genocidal dictator'.

Here is my response:

Hello,
Thanks for this detailed response to my request.

Now, you say that the 'anti-Galloway lobby' generally see him as a 'Muslim-lover'; I think I see through him. Does he really care about ordinary Muslims? I don't think so. I think he cares about any bandwagon which serves his ego and anti-West agenda, to be quite honest.

I want to be clear here; I do fundamentally disagree with most of Galloway's beliefs, but finding him to be quite an unpleasant person is separate from that. Galloway is a hypocrite, full stop, and he picks and chooses his causes to suit himself.

He was happy for Geert Wilders to be banned from Britain under threat of Muslim violence, but he feels being banned from Canada is an unbearable affront, as well as pretending that the Jewish Defence League will attack him or incite violence against him. I don't know about you, but it seems to me the vast majority of the violence and violent rhetoric in the world today does not come from Jewish organisations but from the militants Galloway spends his life apologising for.

You must also ask yourself why Galloway is generally free to strut around the world spreading his message, when critics of Islamic militancy such as Mr Wilders must live in genuine fear of their lives.

Anyway, on to your list of points:
Yes the title of the video is anti-Galloway, but it was hosted by an anti-Galloway channel. I'm sure there are plenty of pro-Galloway ones that also carry the clip. You'll notice that he's talking on Press TV, the Iranian equivalent of al-Jazeera, and I think that alone enables us to take much of what he says with a large pinch of salt. That's not to say I necessarily trust the Western media either, for the record.

You can re-define what Omar al-Bashir is all you want, but the fact is I doubt you'd want to live under his rule or that you genuinely find the man morally acceptable. He is at the very least a ruthless authoritarian - the very sort of person Galloway would love to protest against if he wasn't a Muslim Arab and it didn't suit his agenda this month (don't forget, he's got to get elected to a largely Muslim constituency in east London in a year or two).

Now we get on to definitions of genocide - again, we're back to hypocrisy. If a non-Muslim country was treating Muslims the way Bashir is treating his citizens, we'd have peace marches and protests and hand-wringing. But it's the same old story - I've never seen student occupations and protests about how Arab countries treat their citizens, or when Hamas purged Fatah elements from Gaza - this is why I made my comment about Muslim deaths, because on some issues the Left always seems oddly silent.

Al-Bashir has been in power since 1993. He appointed himself president after seeing his power base increase and then disbanded other political parties. Is this not how a dictator behaves?

I think there is a middle ground to be taken between the typical 'what's happening in Darfur is the worst humanitarian crisis ever line' and 'nothing's happening in Darfur, move along, nothing to see here.' Why did Kofi Annan meet with al-Bashir on three occasion in 2004 and demand he disarm the Janjaweed? The estimated death toll of the ethnic cleansing in Darfur is 200,000 - 400,000. Al-Bashir claimed it was just 10,000. Why should I take his word?

Whatever you feel the West has to gain by inventing these charges of genocide, it's clear that something deeply unpleasant is occurring there, but I too find the modern Western habit of painting a metaphorical Hitler moustache on all its opponents distasteful and counter-productive. But anyway, is the West inventing the testimony of survivors?

I can believe they might doctor Wikipedia, but why only on this issue? Wikipedia often seems biased in the opposite direction on other articles, and surely the criminals Olmert and Bush would want themselves and their conflicts seen in only a good light?

Galloway also fails to mention what Sudan and al-Bashir are getting in return for 'every drop' of their oil - military hardware and training programmes from the Chinese Government so they can continue the war against the black Africans of the south west.

I'm not going to get into 'Olmert, Blair and Bush are the biggest war criminals' territory; I don't personally care for any of them or their policies, but there is a huge difference between deliberately targeting civilians and doing your very best not to target civilians.

In a sense I agree bringing al-Bashir before the ICC is absurd, but only because I think the ICC itself is absurd; but not as absurd as pretending that China, the Arab World or the African Union have more moral legitimacy than the West.

I am not blind to the faults of the West and Israel (a country in which many Sudanese refugees are finding a new life), but it occurs to me that none of the former countries and organisations are exactly paragons of freedom, human rights and military restraint.

I think part of the problem here is simply definition; the word 'genocide' is over-used, in my opinion. But if Slobodan Milosevic was guilty of it and deserved to go to the ICC, then so is and does al-Bashir.