May 27, 2004 | Read Time: 6 minutes
The actress Angelina Jolie presented an Oscar at the 76th Annual Academy Awards around the time she was announcing a personal award to provide $50,000 to rescue a forgotten group of people along the Chad-Sudan border.
“It stuns me that such a dramatic emergency is nowhere to be found in the headlines,” Ms. Jolie, good-will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told the news media in early March, a few days after the Oscar ceremony. The U.N. refugee agency, she noted, “has termed the refugee crisis in Chad an invisible emergency. Without relief assistance and immediate relocation to safer sites, tens of thousands of innocent lives may be lost.”
Not only had much of the news media not noticed, but most people in philanthropy seemed unaware that a million people, most of them women and children, were fleeing burning villages, aerial bombing, machine-gun fire from helicopters, rape, and widespread violence in Darfur, Sudan. More than 110,000 refugees had crossed the border into Chad, making shelters out of branches and straw, enduring scorching sun by day, freezing temperatures by night, hoping aid workers would find them before the marauding militiamen did.
There was almost no water. A nonprofit group had to drill 1,000 yards down to find any. Yet in a hellish paradox, by the first of June the rainy season will have turned escape routes into impassable morass.
The New York Times said the disaster in Sudan echoed Rwanda 10 years ago, and predicted that the outcome “will test whether the world has learned anything.”
Donors certainly do not seem to be passing the test.
Most grant makers and other donors don’t know about the world’s most serious refugee emergency; even the most sophisticated say it is governments’ responsibility, then turn their backs. As a result, government and private donations to the Chad-Sudan nightmare and 19 other United Nations-recognized humanitarian emergencies total far less than the humanitarian aid channeled to two international headaches — Iraq and Afghanistan.
A half century ago it was private philanthropy, not governmental agencies, that provided seed money to solve the world’s worst refugee problem by making a gift to a fledgling organization called the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. A massive population of refugees was roaming around Europe with no durable solution in sight after World War II. The venerable Ford Foundation gave $3.1-million to the U.N. agency to fuel a pilot project that would enable refugees to integrate into the cities and towns they had ended up in — a way to solve the problem by literally dissolving it across Europe. The approach worked. Important government donations followed.
Today such philanthropic leadership is in short supply.
One of the world’s most professional foundations delegated an April request for money to deal with the Chad-Sudan emergency to a consultant; when the consultant was reached by phone a week after the request was sent, the consultant couldn’t comment, saying, “I haven’t read the paper yet.” The newspaper in the foundation’s hometown reported that day on Sudanese parents who “were allowed by the militia to choose how their children would die: burned alive or shot to death.”
The next day the chief adviser to one of the world’s most prominent philanthropists dashed all hopes at the offices of the United States Association for UNHCR. Although the donor had given millions to the refugee cause previously, his adviser explained that the murder of four humanitarian workers had caused him to “end our involvement in humanitarian assistance.”
Humanitarian groups could not wait for foundations and other donors. In February the U.N. refugee agency moved staff members to a 370-mile arid border zone between Chad and Sudan and hired organizations like CARE, the International Medical Corps, and Doctors Without Borders to provide aid. It ferried 55,000 people to safer inland refugee camps, obtained donated food rations from the World Food Program, and flew 13 planeloads of relief items weighing more than 550 tons — tents, blankets, plastic sheeting for makeshift shelters, jerrycans to carry water, and even some four-wheel-drive vehicles.
It’s not just foundations that failed to contribute the money to pay for all that aid — it’s individual donors who have not been motivated to write checks. That’s a sharp contrast to the situation in Kosovo in 1999, when donors in the United States contributed $2-million to the U.S. Association for UNHCR. Other major humanitarian groups also got a big response to the well-publicized crisis in Europe’s backyard. The International Rescue Committee’s direct-marketing official, Mark Collins, reports donor checks “just poured in” for Kosovo, while this breathtaking African emergency hasn’t gotten the same traction.
Powerful winds have driven American donors far from their past high ground of moral leadership and into a low ground of serenity and inaction — so far that they cannot even feel the maelstrom around them.
To understand what is prompting that behavior, just look at polling of Americans done recently by Peter D. Hart Research Associates. At a time when American dials are tuned to 24-hour coverage of the mess in Iraq, Americans are much less optimistic about what can be achieved on the ground in conflict situations. Historically more interested in giving to causes in their own backyard, Americans view all international appeals through a pragmatic lens.
Americans who participated in the study put the prevention of instability and conflicts far down on their list of what they viewed as achievable. Such goals as promoting peace and democracy were similarly viewed as overly idealistic and a poor investment. In fact, even preventing terrorism was judged a poor bet by Americans, considered an unwieldy project yielding uncertain returns on the dollar.
What projects did they want to give to? Most people said they wanted to “help people help themselves.” One focus-group participant summed up the research by saying of self-sufficiency: “I think, that’s the ultimate goal.”
Such penny-wise thinking is perfectly reasonable, but refutes experts who say the historical lesson out of Rwanda is how little it took to stop the killing, not how much. The same situation is playing out in Sudan today.
President Bill Clinton explained the metrics this way when he went to Rwanda in 1998:
“It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”
Of course it’s great to teach a man to fish. But if a man is standing by a lake of fish, and a bunch of people are storming down the road about to kill him, the donation of a fishing pole is not much help.
Americans can’t stay so removed from the unpleasant and poorly publicized events happening inside their global village. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to conflicts like ethnic cleansing. Foundations and grant makers led before. They must do so again. If they generously support muscular solutions to the plight of refugees and displaced people, maybe government donors will follow.
Molly Raiser is chair of the United States Association for U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, in Washington.
