So, basically, said the bloke on the internet, most Live Aid money went to buy arms, that\u2019s correct isn’t it? Well, no, it isn\u2019t actually. And it wasn\u2019t even what the story claimed which the blogger purported to be commenting on. But it tells you rather a lot about the power of suggestion \u2013 and the crude subliminal messages that people pick up even when reading a carefully-nuanced piece of writing. And it also tells us something, I suspect, about what people want to believe, and why.<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s, for the sake of the record, get some facts straight. The story, by the BBC World Service\u2019s Africa analyst, Martin Plaut, said he had evidence that millions of dollars, earmarked for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85, went to buy weapons. The rebels of the Tigrean People\u2019s Liberation Front, the TPLF, had diverted $95m of aid cash into its fight to overthrow the government of the time. He quoted two senior rebel soldiers as saying that rebels had dressed up as merchants to trick NGOs like Christian Aid into handing over large amounts of cash, purportedly to buy food. To back up the claims he cited recently released CIA documents, and quoted a senior US diplomat as saying that at the time they had believed that aid was \u201calmost certainly being diverted for military purposes\u201d.<\/p>\n
This sounds convincing. But it all starts to slip through your fingers when you examine it. First consider the two rebel leaders making these allegations. One is Aregawi Berhe, whom the BBC described as \u201cthe former commander of the TPLF’s army\u201d. This brings the first twitch on the antennae, for Berhe was a commander, rather than the commander; he lead the rebel\u2019s sixth offensive against the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu. More significantly Berhe is someone who subsequently fell out with other TPLF leaders and fled to Holland, from where he has over the past few years conducted a persistent attack on Meles Zenawi, the TPLF leader who went on to become the Prime Minister of Ethiopia.<\/p>\n
The other rebel official in the BBC story is Gebremedhin Araya, a senior figure in the TPLF\u2019s finance department who was photographed in a book by Christian Aid\u2019s Max Peberdy dressed up as a Muslim merchant counting the charity\u2019s money after selling it sacks of grain which were really, he said, filled with sand. Araya too was purged by the TPLF and fled to exile in Australia.<\/p>\n
So the core of the BBC story rests on the claims of two individuals with a grievance against the current Ethiopian government and a track-record of attempts to discredit it. That does not mean they are wrong, but it sets up reasonable doubts.<\/p>\n
Then there were other niggling discrepancies. Aregawi Berhe claimed that Peberdy had handed over $2m where the records show that he had had only $50,000 with him. Then the 4-page CIA document which suggested that \u201csome funds that insurgent organisations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes\u201d is dated April 1985 \u2013 three months before the Live Aid concert. A separate, much more comprehensive 18-page CIA document dated July 1985 makes no mention of aid cash going on arms in rebel areas.<\/p>\n
Finally Martin Plaut quoted Robert Houdek, the most senior US diplomat in Ethiopia in 1988, the year after the TPLF overthrew Mengistu, as saying that the former rebels told him that \u201csome of the food coming in through the Sudan was being sold for<\/p>\n
cash\u201d. He added: \u201cAnd of course with money you can buy weapons, you can buy fuel. That was going on. There was no question about that.\u201d But, again, Houdek is offering hearsay, not evidence.<\/p>\n
Those closely involved in the aid effort have been fierce in their rebuttals of the BBC story. Bob Geldof dismissed it as \u201ctotal bollocks\u201d revealing that less than half a per cent of all Live Aid money spent in 1985 went to Tigray. In the six years to 1991 Band Aid\u2019s total spend there was only \u00a311m and most of that went not on food aid but on agriculture, forestry, livestock, water and health and the use of the money was stringently monitored by Band Aid staff in the field and external evaluators.<\/p>\n
Christian Aid, more politely, said that its investigations \u201cdo not correspond to the BBC\u2019s version of events\u201d. It had robust on-the-ground assessment criteria in place to monitor the spending of emergency food relief. There is far more evidence that the money was channelled to where it should have been than there is for much going astray. The BBC story was \u201coutrageous and very damaging\u201d.<\/p>\n
Indeed. \u201cLive Aid concert\u2019s Ethiopian famine aid spent on weapons,\u201d said the headline on one leading Washington website. In London the inventive cartoonist Peter Brook twisted the Live Aid guitar logo into a Death Aid one. Distortions of the truth, wilful and otherwise, abounded.<\/p>\n
Why, I often wonder, are people so gleefully prepared to believe such stories? Because it gives them an intellectually-respectable excuse for not putting their hand in their pocket to help those so evidently in need. It is why neo-liberal down-with-aid Africans are routinely feted on the north London dinner party circuit. When our tv screens show so many people in the world in abject need we need something to assuage our guilt at the contrast between their lives and ours. The idea that \u201call aid is wasted through corruption\u201d is a convenient conscience salve.<\/p>\n
No-one who has been involved in the delivery of aid would deny that corruption is a serious problem. But the central ethical imperative is to find ways to counter corruption while still helping those in need. Most donors now have rigorous systems in place to monitor aid delivery and minimise the risks of diversion. Some money may well have gone astray in Ethiopia in 1985. But not on the scale which the BBC has alleged. To dress up claims as evidence on such an important issue is journalism of the most irresponsible kind.<\/p>\n
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