The road to hell

Michael Maren has spent much of the last twenty years in Africa, first as an aid worker, later as a journalist. He witnessed at close range a harrowing series of wars, famines, and natural disasters. In The Road to Hell he tells how CARE unwittingly assisted a Somali dictator in building a political and economic powerbase. How the UN, Save the Children, and many other nongovernmental organizations provided raw materials for ethnic factions who subsequently threatened genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Burundi. He brings firsthand reports of African farmers, Western aid workers, and corrupt politicians from many countries, joined together in a vicious circle of self-interest. Above all, he heralds an important truth: humanitarian intervention and foreign aid activity is necessarily political. It gets hijacked by powerful charities and agricultural interests. It is cynically manipulated by local strongmen to control rebellious populations. And it is the last refuge of Western colonialism. We all want to end the suffering. But our desire to alleviate suffering often stands in the way of the truth. If you think your charitable giving is making the Third World a better place, think again.