Humanitarian Aid in a World of Politics

Larry Minear

The scene was a church basement session on world hunger. After a discussion about the work of private groups like Lutheran World Relief, a woman approached me with a question. "I'm all for helping people," she said. "But why does it have to be so . . . ," she wrinkled up her nose, ". . . political?"

A number of answers flashed through my mind. "Because people who need help are usually powerless. ..." "Because politics is the arena where decisions about human welfare are made...." "Because governments cause suffering...." "Because life is political . . ."

"No," I thought. Better to accentuate the positive. "Helping people isn't political at all. It involves assisting them whoever they are, wherever they are, regardless of why they're hurting or who gets the credit for helping." Unable to sort out my own multiple choices, I smiled, joined her lament, and let the issue pass.

Her question, however, is a reasonable one. It goes to the heart of humanitarian assistance work. My paralysis also was understandable, given the complexity of helping people in today's world of suffering and violence. But an answer is in order, and a good starting place may be with some definitions.

Politics and the Political

For many Americans, politics is almost a dirty word. "Does your father work?", we used to ask each other as kids. "No, he's a politician" would come the answer. Before government employee productivity became a campaign issue, my wife greeted slipshod

performance with the comment, "Close enough for government work." And long before the "the sleaze factor" became a familiar expression, a widely accepted synonym for political in my parents' circle was "scummy."

The "p" word, however, deserves better treatment, as we acknowledge in our more reflective moments. Politics is the arena in which we establish national priorities–the relative importance of military and social expenditures, domestic and international obligations, health care and housing, and agricultural price supports and urban job training. As the term "arena" suggests, politics is part of the ongoing struggle to enhance the quality of human life.

What governments do is also political, simply because governments are governments. However we feel about governments, most people would acknowledge that some of the things they do are necessary and beneficial to human welfare.

Yet politics concern more than decisions made "out there" in the public arena, whether or not the government is involved. There are also, in a broad sense, political dimensions to the choices we make as individuals and families: how we spend our time and money, use our talents, or relate to each other as human beings. Having the power to choose, moreover, makes the process of decision making itself an expression of power.

For Christians, involvement in the political realm is a reflection of responsible citizenship and our common humanity. Indeed, Lutherans view themselves as holders of dual citizenship: participants in the kingdom of heaven and citizens of a temporal power. Heavenly citizenship is clearly prior. However, American–and we would now add, global–citizenship carries with it definite political and social responsibilities.

Participating in the process of establishing justice and protecting the poor is a central expression of our Christian faith, not a tangent or afterthought. Politics and the political, therefore, concern the choices we make throughout our lives, as well as our stewardship of power at every level–from superpower and national to local and individual.

Impelled by Christian faith to help people in need, our efforts to assist people in developing countries encounter certain political realities. First, our efforts intersect with governments, ours and theirs. Secondly, our efforts themselves are an expression of power. Thirdly, the fact that we are Americans has political implications. Understanding these realities may enhance the effectiveness of our aid.

Helping People and Dealing with Governments

"Aid Convoy Is Turned Back at Border" reads a June 15, 1988 news item from Laredo, Texas. "A convoy of food and medical supplies destined for Nicaragua was turned away from the border with Mexico today, a week after it arrived here, and most of the group headed for Washington instead to press their case."

In the absence of a license to export the vehicles, U.S. authorities rebuffed the initial attempt of veterans and peace advocates to donate 30 tons of humanitarian items and the vehicles transporting them to social service agencies in Nicaragua. The group's appeals to the Reagan Administration in Washington to interpret current law more flexibly also failed. So, too, did the intervention of members of Congress who did not share the administration's expressed concern that the vehicles could serve other than humanitarian purposes.

The incident highlights an important reality: helping people can be a complicated proposition. To be sure, the U.S. government has made doing so– even by established humanitarian groups–especially difficult where government relationships are hostile. No matter that the U.S. government, which included trucks and jeeps in the "humanitarian" aid it sent the Nicaraguan contras, was being inconsistent in requiring that the vehicles, "mostly small pickup trucks, aging school buses and rickety, brightly painted panel trucks," be returned to the U.S.

While the Nicaraguan convoy may be something of a special case, aid agencies, even under normal circumstances, have frequent dealing with the U.S. and recipient governments. American aid agencies are incorporated under state or federal law. They benefit from federal laws making contributions tax-deductible and providing reduced postal rates. Their American personnel travel on U.S. passports and are subject to regulations governing the travel of U.S. citizens. Agencies which accept grants from the State Department or the Agency for International Development (AID) are strictly accountable for how they use them.

The work of private agencies also requires the consent and often the active cooperation of recipient government authorities. U.S. personnel must have visas and residence permits; aid programs themselves need duty-free entry and sometimes off-loading priority for imported supplies. Many private agencies require cash or in-kind contributions from recipient governments as an indication of their commitment. In short, the very existence and functioning of private aid agencies takes place in relation to governments and thus in a political context.

Most agencies, including Lutheran World Relief (LWR), pride themselves on functioning "apolitically." By this, they mean that they do not allow governments to impede their efforts to reach those in need. Agencies have discovered, however, that in order to maintain their freedom of action to help people, they sometimes need to challenge government practices which obstruct their efforts.

Thus, LWR has joined with other private humanitarian groups in seeking to persuade the U.S. government to clarify and expand the legal protection for aid shipments to countries such as Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Cambodia from which U.S. official aid and trade is barred. If unwarranted restrictions were allowed to stand, humanitarian aid would become subject to political considerations, with aid prevented from reaching needy people who happen to live in "enemy" countries. This would do violence to the conviction that all God's creatures share a common humanity.

LWR and other humanitarian groups have also played a role in the process through which assistance is provided by the U.S. government to people in need overseas. In 1959, LWR official Dr. Paul C. Empie testified before Congress on U.S. international food assistance. In 1986, LWR Board President Dr. Robert J. Marshall urged a congressional committee to increase human needs assistance to people in Sub-Saharan Africa. In between and from time to time, other LWR officials and staff have made recommendations to policymakers on issues of concern.

In short, there is no way of avoiding it: helping people means dealing with governments as well.

Helping People and Dealing with Power

Private aid agencies customarily present their work in highly personal terms. In promotional materials, they solicit contributions to provide food, health care, or education for a given child or family or potable water, irrigation pumps, or livestock for a given community. Indeed, such contributions do these things. Helping people is attractive; it is direct, personal, tangible, and ostensibly unaffected by "political" considerations.

In reality, while the human connection is important, the situation is more complex. How are recipients of such aid selected? How does being selected affect those in a given family, community, or country who are not? Among those selected, does the aid relationship encourage self-reliance or dependency?

After all, aid is power. Aid agencies deal with power even when they are not dealing with governments. Agencies which, in the familiar example, give people a fish are, for at least a while, reducing their vulnerability to hunger. Agencies which teach people to fish are helping them take more control over their lives. Agencies which help people protect their fishing rights are equipping them to safeguard their futures.

All aid affects the lives of people, the choices they are able to make, and their place in society. That is, after all, what helping people is designed to do. Who would support assistance which failed to change people's lives? The question is not whether change comes about, but whether the change is positive, and how "positive" is understood.

Some agencies consider aid successful if it improves, temporarily or permanently, the life of the poor. Others frame success in terms of enhancing the ability of the poor to improve their own lot. Still others ask not whether the poor are better off but whether they have narrowed the gap in relation to the non-poor. Some use a combination of these, or other, criteria.

If aid affects the power of recipients, it also has a bearing on the power of governments. South Africa offers a case in point. Agencies seeking to help Blacks, whether in the homelands or elsewhere, are caught in a dilemma. To function in South Africa at all, they need to do so within the terms set by government authorities. Providing assistance within those terms, however, risks reinforcing an unjust situation; failing to provide assistance could make a bad situation worse. In such circumstances, can outside aid be provided in ways which avoid reinforcing injustice and, more positively, represent a force for social change?

To guide its functioning in South Africa, LWR has developed ground rules which stipulate, among other things, that the activities it supports must enable Blacks to resist apartheid and must strengthen groups working to bring about positive change. Recent efforts by the South African government to restrict outside funding indicate that it well understands the political implications of humanitarian interventions. The choices for aid agencies are excruciating, the more so because no option is without political implications.

Aid also means power for agencies which provide it. Over the years, in fact, aid has given agencies in the richer countries such power that groups on the receiving end are beginning to insist on more mutuality. Rather than simply doing the bidding of those who have resources to provide, indigenous aid groups are now forcefully asserting responsibility for development in their countries and communities. Greater mutuality is likely to mean reduced power for what used to be called "donor agencies" and more accountability to those receiving aid.

Finally, people who contribute to aid agencies have very real power, informal as well as formal, over those agencies. Anticipating donor reaction, agencies may avoid activities which, however appropriate, might create controversy and undermine support. At the height of U.S. military involvement in Indochina, for example, some 68 American private groups were helping people in Vietnam. Now, more than a decade after the war's end, less than a dozen are involved. The decrease in activity does not mean that the decision to help the Vietnamese people is more "political" now than during the war years, only that it is more controversial.

There is no way of avoiding it: helping people means dealing with power.

Helping People and Being American

"When I went to Vietnam," recalls Jim Klassen, an American who worked for a private relief agency during and after the Vietnam war, "I thought I could be apolitical. I soon learned that all of my actions carried political overtones. . . . My living under the Thieu government (the U.S. ally in South Vietnam) was a highly political act, just as (was my) living under the Provisional Revolutionary Government after April 1975 (when the U.S. withdrew and the government changed). Consequently, I understood that living under any government–even the U.S. government– is a highly political act."

Nationality does influence relationships, even between people without a helping mission, a government connection, or a political agenda. When governments themselves, especially superpowers, are involved, the political dimension is heightened.

For more than 20 years, the Dutch embassy in Moscow–in the absence of diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.S.S.R.–has arranged exit visas for more than 250,000 Soviet Jews. Why have the Soviets allowed the Dutch to assist emigres and provide solidarity with refuseniks whose emigration they have barred? "The protectiveness toward the desperate, which the Soviets often take as irritating political gamemanship when practiced by Americans," explains a reporter, "is accepted in the Dutch as a sign of national compassion."

The moral of these two tales is not that it is a mistake for Americans, privately or through their government, to assist people in need. It is rather that their aid needs to be sensitive to current political realities as perceived by recipient peoples and governments. Agencies such as Klassen's Mennonite Central Committee try to prepare staff for encountering "degrees of suspicion and hatred because of the link between Western military, economic, and political policies and . . . conditions of oppression and poverty." Staff are encouraged to respond by seeking "to establish an identity that clearly reflects membership in Christ's new community which embodies peace and justice for all peoples."

In fact, there are ways of taking into account the unavoidable political dimensions involved when Americans assist others. Some U.S. private agencies work with indigenous groups rather than setting up their own (that is, American) programs. The U.S. government can also, to a certain extent, depoliticize its aid efforts by working through United Nations agencies.

Politics and Helping People

Returning to the church basement, let us ask again whether helping people has to be political. Assistance does not have to be–indeed, should not be– political in the sense that it is denied to people who need it because they or their government are of a particular political ideology or, for that matter, economic philosophy, religious belief, racial, or ethnic make-up.

On the other hand, effective assistance needs to take into account a variety of political factors. Aid should be provided with careful attention to its effects on people who receive it, on the political authorities, and on those here and abroad who provide it. Since aid seeks to change lives, especially those whose poverty makes them particularly vulnerable to suffering, one element in its success will be the extent to which it empowers the poor. Even short-term, emergency aid can be provided in such ways.

We live in an era in which superpower rivalries infuse many aspects of international and national life, political tensions spill over onto the activities of American private and governmental aid agencies, rampant violence makes

the provision of aid both more necessary and more difficult, and human suffering is so widespread that many people doubt the value of seeking to help. It would be remarkable if aid itself had not become caught up in political controversies and if some would-be aid contributors had not come to question its effectiveness.

Christians, however, cannot allow ideology or cynicism to have the last word. Undergirded by theological convictions about the claims of the poor on justice and about our common humanity with those in need, Christians and their aid agencies need both to deepen their commitment to assist those who suffer, whatever the obstacles, and to enlarge their wisdom and resourcefulness in overcoming such obstacles. In this sense, we need to become practitioners of what has been called "humanitarian politics."

We thus acknowledge the appropriately political dimensions of our activity. "The greatest abuse of humanitarian aid," someone has remarked, "is not to understand its power and (not) to use it towards positive ends accordingly." Nor should we allow ourselves to be bound by political constraints. Sizing up the political realities of situations of need in Southern Africa and Northern Ethiopia, for example, we then need to proceed with the task of helping those in need take command of their own lives.

Wisely using the power associated with human needs assistance, however, is not easy. "If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do," says a character in Shakespeare's Merchant. of Venice, "chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces." Humanitarian politics requires not only discernment by aid agencies but understanding among contributors–and clarity on the part of those who venture to speak in church basements.

Larry Minear heads the development policy office of Lutheran World Relief and Church World Service in Washington, D.C. He lives on Capitol Hill with his wife and two children.