Sunday, January 09, 2011

Charitable Enterprise versus Independent Initiative

How many humanitarian aid groups should it take to jump-start a country from hopelessly failed to haplessly struggling?

There are those who have witnessed the generations-long struggles of countries to overcome their state of endemic poverty and government inaction with the aid of the international community whose conscience will not permit them to sit idly by while those unfortunate misery-plagued countries fester in government graft and corruption, their populations left to fend for themselves.

The Palestinians have UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which committed away back in 1948 to support and provide for displaced Palestinians, with the formation of the State of Israel. From 1948 to the present, without outside assistance Israel has managed to make of itself a technologically, scientifically, academically, socially, politically, agriculturally modern state.

From 1948 to the present, the Palestinian refugees who originally numbered 726,000 became entirely dependent on UNRWA to provide for them in special refugee camps where welfare entitlements like cash, housing, health care, education, credit, public works and social services were provided free, by the United Nations and the international community. The welfare syndrome, as anyone knows, deprives people of the will to provide for themselves.

Instead of focusing themselves on their own social, political, civic and economic development, the 726,000 refugees have lived on welfare. And in that perpetual state they have managed to increase their numbers to 4.8 million, all of them living on that same UNRWA welfare, effectively disincentivizing that 4.8 million from independence, from building their own working state.

What that 4.8 million have been free to do, unencumbered by the need to account for themselves and to make a living for themselves, is to brood and to mourn and to see themselves as unfortunate victims, a deranged, corrupted society whose values have been bereft of initiative and pride. They have instead taken the initiative to become bitterly and viciously aggrieved, devoting energy to violence against the country they see as their oppressor.

That's a particular misery in the Middle East, with a festering society cared for by a specially designed and delegated UN mission that has maintained them as permanent refugees unlike any other situation of refugees elsewhere, world-wide. These refugees are adamant that they will no longer be refugees only when they re-occupy the geography that the State of Israel now sits on, and UNRWA's actions are not those to disabuse them of this attitudinal certainty.

And then there's another geography, in the Americas, where no fewer than twelve thousand aid groups work tirelessly in Haiti to provide compassion, care and charity to a miserable population which has never experienced a government dedicated to their material and existential well-being. Each successive government has dabbled in corruption, free to do nothing since humanitarian groups strive mightily to provide the civic necessities that a government should for its population.

Haiti suffers through one crisis after another; from government collapse and failure to environmental and geological crises that each time brings the country to its faltering knees in collapse and despair. Haiti is yet another country that has succumbed to a culture of dependence. Potable drinking water is delivered daily to refugee camps where over a million internally displaced refugees live squalid lives a full year after a devastating earthquake hit.

Billions of dollars have been spent over the years, courtesy of the international community, attempting to manoeuvre Haiti into some semblance of responsive, responsible governance. There is no public sanitation as such in the country, hygiene is difficult to maintain, many people have little option but to drink water infected with fecal matter, and endemic illness is all too common. A class system ensures that the poor remain unemployed and poor.

The cynical claim that aid delivery is a business, nothing more nothing less. That this is a business determined to perpetuate itself, while delivering humanitarian aid. It is a business that is well funded through charitable impulse, the guilt feelings of those who have the great good fortune to live normal, comfortable lives with employment that is well remunerated, to enable the aid groups to get on with their business of alleviating poverty.

Almost all contracts for reconstruction are awarded to foreign companies, not indigenous ones. Aid groups often work in cross-purpose to one another, redundantly and wastefully. Above all, without a focus on education, health care and employment that is self-generating no country, no aspiring nation can succeed to fulfill its potential.

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posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 09, 2011

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