The United Nations secretary general has appealed to donor countries to open their eyes – and their coffers – to Africa’s suffering, writes Victoria Brittain
Declaring that humanitarian catastrophes are reaching “irrevocable crisis proportions” in several African countries, the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, is putting his weight behind a ministerial meeting on Africa at the UN headquarters in New York next month, designed to be a wake-up call to a world that seems to be abandoning the troubled continent.
“We have had a very poor response to our appeals for the crises in Africa. The needs are mounting, but we are not able to get those countries which have resources to give,” said Annan.
“In the face of Africa’s natural disasters and long-running wars, people talk of donor fatigue but how can we be that insensitive when we see the pain? Is it that we are not telling the story effectively?”
The UN is almost the only organisation which is telling the story: of the 200 Angolans every day who die deaths related in some way to the country’s war; of the tens of thousands of Angolan, Congolese, Sudanese and Somali children who have lost all hope of living ordinary family lives or having access to schools or clinics; of the countless Sierra Leonian children who have lost hands and arms to the machetes of rebel fighters who have tortured the country since 1991.
Even beyond Africa’s war zones, desperation has become a norm, said Annan. Recently two youths from Guinea lost their lives when they stowed away under a plane flying to Belgium. They were trying to escape everyday lives without hope and get an education in the Europe so familiar to them from television.
Annan said Angola is the country most affected by long-running conflict, with insecurity intensifying as Jonas Savimbi’s Unita movement struggles to take over the Central Highlands.
An estimated 600 000 Angolans are in acute need and there are fears for up to a further three million whose conditions cannot be ascertained because they live beyond the range within which UN agencies are able to operate under current conditions.
In Somalia 300 000 people face starvation now and another one million are in a rapidly deteriorating condition. Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Congo (Brazzaville), the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda are also facing serious humanitarian need, according to the UN.
“My predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, used to call these `orphan crises’ and they still are,” said Annan – crises largely neglected and ignored by the world.
At the root of most of these crises is prolonged insecurity or civil war. Annan highlighted hard-won peace initiatives which the UN fears could be doomed if outside assistance is not forthcoming, particularly in Sierra Leone and Congo.
Annan’s language is diplomatic, but among the many disheartened aid officials there is bitterness. “The world spends $9-billion [about R54-million] a year on pet food,” said one, “and cannot find less than one- tenth of that for the most dispossessed people in the world.”
The UN has received less than half the R4,8-billion it appealed for this year to give urgent help to 12-million people in Africa.
The UN’s top emergency official, Sergio Vieira de Mello, said that the alarm had been raised in the last few weeks by various UN agencies such as the World Food Programme and the UN refugee agency, but had apparently been met with indifference.
De Mello said that a number of donor countries were experiencing stock-market booms, budget surpluses and positive rates of growth, but overseas aid had dropped since the early 1990s from R378-billion to R288-billion.
A trend of declining aid budgets was lamentably clear, he said. Only 38% of the UN’s R636-million appeal for Angola has been forthcoming, De Mello said, and of the R384-million it requested for Somalia only R132-million has materialised.
In Congo (Brazzaville), where hundreds of thousands of people fled the capital because of fighting between rival leaders, an appeal for R87-million has brought in nothing. In the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, where civil war has virtually split the country in half and vast areas are outside any control, the UN has received just R20-million of the R46- million it sought from the international community.
De Mello, like Annan, talks of donor fatigue. “Many of these countries are perceived to be chronically insecure and aid spent there is thought to be in danger of being wasted,” he said. This, he warned, could become “a self-fulfilling prophecy” because without aid, troubled countries were even more at risk of relapsing into cycles of violence and war.
“The victims of civil war seldom have any control of the political and military leaders who perpetuate the violence. They should not be penalised for the callousness and the irresponsibility of their leaders,” he said.