No
need to denigrate
Bob Geldof
This
is the first of two columns on the coming discussion
on Africa at the G8 Summit
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
June 29, 2005
LONDON - Never in the history of
fundraising had so much been raised so fast. Live Aid was
the inspiration of one rock musician, Bob Geldof, the
Irish leader of the "Boomtown Rats" who, like millions of
others, was moved by Michael Buerk's BBC television
report from famine-struck Ethiopia. Later Geldof was to
wonder what would have happened if he'd gone to his local
pub in London's Chelsea instead of staying in and
watching television that night.
Now twenty years later Geldof is
aiming even higher - not just more concerts in more
venues, but to change the very political climate towards
African development. No longer is it just a question of
donating coins and notes it is a matter, he says, of
doubling government aid, forgiving outstanding debt and
abolishing the multitude of trade barriers that seriously
impede Africa's economic progress. Saturday's concerts
will set the scene for his big push at the Group of 8
summit in Scotland on July 6th where Africa is at the top
of the agenda.
Geldof is already being besieged
the those who have the irritating irresistible urge to
undermine what is good, or at least to assert it is not
as quite as noble as it looks. John Kay, writing in the
Financial Times last week, said Geldof was "full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing". And in a damning piece in
the new issue of Prospect magazine, supposed to be the
favorite monthly of both Prime Minister Tony Blair and
his chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, David
Rieff has gone over the record of Live Aid's work during
the Ethiopian famine and accused it of having
"contributed to as many deaths" as it saved. Rieff argues
that Geldof and Live Aid were party to Ethiopia's
Stalinist resettlement policy when President Mengitsu
Haile Mariam attempted to forcibly remove 600,000 people
from one part of the country to another.
There is a case to be made against
the sometimes simplicity of aid giving, as William
Shawcross did so well in his book "The Quality of Mercy"
when he showed that the great relief operation mounted
from Thailand on its border with war-ravaged Cambodia
ended up feeding the displaced army of Pol Pot, giving it
strength to fight another day. Likewise, Michela Wrong in
her book, "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz", her stunningly
effective recreation of the Congo under Mobutu, showed
how western relief built up the strength of the Hutu
militias driven out of Rwanda and given refuge in the
eastern Congo.
On another level we can also fairly
criticize the naiveté of both Jeffrey Sachs and
Geldof with their call for aid to Africa to be quickly
doubled. But this attack by Rieff is none of these
things. It is a malicious distortion of the facts. There
is no good evidence that Live Aid was party to the forced
removals. Moreover, according to an evaluation made by
the UN's Emergency Office for Africa, if it hadn't been
for Live Aid breaking the stalemate of providing trucks
to transport the largely American-donated grain across
Ethiopia from the Red Sea ports where it was languishing
the famine's death toll would have been many times worse.
Geldof's style certainly loosened
up the aid business. He usually arrived without any fuss,
traveling on a cheap ticket with a cheap airline. He sat
through long technical meetings with aid workers and
government officials and, as one observer, noted, "if his
jokes were crude the same couldn't be said of the
substance of his observations".
At the end of his first trip to
Ethiopia he had worked out a strategy, which enabled Live
Aid to make full use of existing aid organizations like
Oxfam and UNICEF. Still the money tricked out too slowly.
"The logistics of getting food to the starving are
horrendous", Geldof said to me at the time. "It is a
massive operation and we don't want to get it wrong."
Geldof made the decision to hold 60% of the funding back
and use it for long term development aid, to try and
ensure such a massive famine didn't recur. This decision
has had a long-lasting impact on the way aid agencies
spend their money.
When Geldof woke up the next day
after watching Michael Buerk's report he immediately
phoned an old friend Midge Uro and they quickly wrote a
new hit, "Don't They Know It's Christmas?" whose chorus
urges listeners to "feed the world". "I was expecting
derision", Geldof told me. "I didn't know we were
articulating the compassion that was there anyway."
Saturday will see more than twice
as many concerts as in 1985. Let us watch and see, not
just the shows, but how the political leaders of the G8
translate compassion into deeds, for there is a lot of
compassion to be tapped, many deeds needing to be done
and little reason to denigrate either.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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