aid and the UN

Linda Polman's new book, War Games, is a must read for those who are not convinced that development aid is achieving all we wish. She also looks at situations where aid organisations keep people alive, without protecting them (Bosnia, Darfur) or disarming the people who are trying to kill them. Her chapters on Rwanda are devastating, describing how the international community rushed to help the people who committed the genocide, but not the victims. Polman's previous book, We Did Nothing, is about the uselessness of UN peacekeeping forces (Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, again) when there is no political will behind peacekeeping missions. She describes how most peacekeepers are recruited from bangladesh and pakistan, and aren't even soldiers. They are unemployed boys collected from villages, put in uniforms and sent off to war zones with no training. The government who supplies them gets $1000 a month from the UN. Romeo Dallaire (Rwanda) describes how the first time he issued orders to a company of these UN peacekeepers, they wet their pants in terror.