4 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
How Humanitarian Aid Feeds War Machines
The pictures are heartbreaking: convoys of United Nations-marked trucks inching toward bomb-scarred cities, desperate children clamoring for supplies. These images seem to prove that the international system is, at the very least, trying to help. Yet in every conflict I have studied—Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia and Gaza—the same trucks double as cash machines for warlords, militias and authoritarian regimes. Aid diversion is a widespread problem in humanitarian operations. Unless the U.S. and other donors rewrite the rules so that aid can't be separated from accountability, they will keep subsidizing the conflicts they abhor.
Somalia shows how thoroughly diversion can be built into routine. Three clan cartels win most World Food Program transport contracts, skim 30% to 50% of the cargo, and then split the spoils with those who transport the food and those who control the displacement camps. Based on U.N. reports and monitors, my coauthor and I estimate in our study that barely one-eighth of donated food reaches intended households.
