Kenya and Gaza

As we ourselves are finding the economy in a recession, the rest of the world is still suffering. In this article, an urgent need for aid is expressed by the President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki. The country has been struck by a drought, which is one of those things that cannot be predicted, and therefore needs to have an emergency strategy. If aid given to Kenya in the past had been aimed to sustain rather than to relieve, maybe they wouldn't need to have to request aid in their current drastic situation.

'In coming months about 10 million people will be dependent upon aid. Since the
last drought in 2006, two rainy seasons have failed to deliver the water
necessary, and the lack of rain has exacerbated the situation dramatically.'

These 10 million people are in danger of starvation, while we in the western world are in danger of losing our stocks and our businesses and our flat screen TVs. Although I believe our economic situation is worrying and although I have no idea about the vastness of the problem, and do not understand the economy at all, some how I still believe that the real emergency lies not with us but with the people that need us to survive.

However, in light of this situation, I should note that we have not given up on the aid mission completely because of our economic crisis. In fact aid to Africa rose by 12% from 2006 to 2007, according to this OECD article.

However, still I must stress the point that unless the aid is used wisely it will do hardly any good, especially for the future. There have been instances where aid has been given to corrupted governments that have used it only for themselves. Also some aid goes into giving technology that is inappropriate, for example a tractor wont be much use if there aren't spare parts or diesel fuel supplied locally.

I say all this, but at the same time, I am not doing anything to help the situation in Africa, I have not played my part at all. After all, what does Kenya have to do with me? This plays into the realist perspective of international relations, which argues that the individual is selfish and power seeking, where each state works in pursuit of its own national interest. Realists argue that power trumps everything. Therefore, are we not helping the rest of the world to the best of our ability because we only care about our own state, our own power, and what surrounds ourselves? if so, a realist could argue that we do not erase debts owed to our country because we enjoy the power we have over those countries less fortunate than ourselves.

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The Good:

In this recent article related to giving aid, Obama impressively seems to be looking out for places in the world other than America. Apparently America is ready to donate $900m in Gaza aid. In the article it talks about the risk of the aid ending up in the hands of the wrong people (the Hamas), therefore showing that America is being wise as to who is recieving their aid:

'Any US aid would have to be approved by Congress, where some are wary that
funds could still end up with Hamas.'

The article says that instead the aid will be going to non governmental and UN organizations, and some to the Palestine authority.

Around 21,000 homes were destroyed or damaged during the recent conflict in Gaza. More than 1,000 people have been killed and 2/3rds of the population of Gaza are without power, water and medical supplies. It is predicted that billions will be needed in order to bring Gaza back to life.

Although we are doing good works by sending Gaza aid, in another article it describes how Gaza was in dire need of aid even before this war-like situation. There had been warnings of mal-nutrition and terrible sanitation. The article calls the nation 'aid-reliant'. This is what we need to battle in the long run. Countries need to be able to work on their own and work towards not being reliant on aid. Ideally they should be able to rely on themselves.

The Decline of Aid

I have come across something today in my search for articles. I was browsing stories on giving aid to LEDC’s (less economically developed countries) on the Sky News website (a British news channel). I noticed that the majority of the stories concerning aid to Africa were written in 2004 and 2005. All of the most recent stories are about helping out ourselves, and giving aid to our own falling corporations, because of the economic recession.

In 2005 there are stories such as these: ‘Africa on Agenda at G8 London Summit’, ‘Brown signs anti-poverty pact’, and ‘Countries to benefit from debt relief’. Then we turn to 2008 and 2009 with stories such as ‘Credit Crunch: US Treasury will spend up to $800bn under rescue plan’, ‘G8 promises not being delivered’ and ‘Chancellor faces grilling over plan to borrow Britain out of recession’. What happened to our dedication to eradicating world poverty?

One could argue that this is because the west no longer can afford to cancel debt and send aid to LEDCs, because we no longer have the money to even keep up our own lifestyles. One could also argue that America needs to tackle their own problems before they are equipped to tackle the poverty of the world. Basically, and quite understandably, developed countries can only afford charity and enthusiasm to deal with poverty while they are flourishing in their own economic success.

But, western world, in case you didn’t realize, people can still die while you are under economic crisis. World poverty doesn’t have a pause button. People cannot simply stop suffering and wait for us to sort out our own problems. In this article , written in 2005, the EU have just agreed to double aid to Africa. The deal says that help will be increased to 44 billion pounds by 2010. I would guess that this is no longer a top priority of the EU, after all 2010 is only one year from now. This can be supported by this article written in 2008, entitled ‘EU aid study finds goals to halve poverty have to be changed’. One statistic that proves that we are spending less money on international aid is: The 27 EU nations spent 0.38 percent of their gross national income of developmental aid in 2007 compared to the 0.41 percent in 2006. One part of this article can quickly sum up the situation our world is in right now, and why we find ourselves unable to give such high amounts of aid:

'A food crisis and economic turmoil are threatening to scuttle U.N. goals to
halve extreme povery around the world by 2015, accorind to an EU report released
Friday.'

While I mostly understand that we are unable to serve the needs of other countries while we have our own needs to attend to, this is yet another reminder of the fact that we live in a selfish world.

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In this article about aid (‘Billions wasted by aid system’) it is argued that money spent on giving aid is being wasted because everything is being used on short-term fixes during emergencies when it really needs to be going towards long-term developments. The article argues that it is the underlying issues of poverty that need to be eradicated and we shouldn’t just be aiming to tackle emergency relief.

I agree with this article: relief is good, but not very effective for the future. I believe we should really be aiming on helping LEDCs become self sufficient. We should begin projects and then put it into the hands of the people so that they can have jobs and then reap the benefits, instead of just placing some westernized object into their lives and leaving them to deal with it. We should be working with them in order to make their economy more efficient and profitable. We need to build their foundations. That would be real aid. The article says:

‘In countless previous emergencies, aid has often arrived too late, was
short-term, and policies were targeted too heavily on saving lives rather than
building resilience in the population’

I know that some aid isn’t pure aid because there are conditions attached to it. You can have this amount of money- IF you spend it on airplanes from a western company. Therefore the money is going straight back into the hands of the aid givers. Countries have spent lots and lots of money on things that are not essential for their survival.

Therefore, we don’t just need to give more aid, but we need to give it selflessly and wisely.

Current Events

Countries all over the world have shown their displeasure for western culture and ideals. This culminating disgust showed itself with a giant bang on September 11th 2001. America would appear to be a very ethnocentric country, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world wants to be just like America.

This BBC article, ‘Sudan call for Valentine Boycott’, is another display of the world deflecting western culture. This article informs us of the Muslim clerics in Sudan that are urging couples to ignore St. Valentine’s Day, arguing that it is ‘a western institution that could lead couples astray’. The article goes on to explain how normal things in western culture are unheard of in their own.

‘Correspondents say public displays of affection between men and women are
unheard of in Sudan's almost entirely Muslim north, with kissing and holding
hands on the street frowned upon in the conservative culture.’

We often forget the fact that some of our western behaviors, which are being increasingly thrust upon the rest of the world through globalization, can be seen as extreme or disrespectful to other countries. Imagine trying to live within your own culture when a different set of western ideas are, in their point of view, contaminating their country.

The article says that the Sudanese religious authorities have condemned Valentine’s Day before, hoping that young couples would instead save their money for marriage. The eastern world is angry at the west for inflicting our culture upon them. They glare upon us with distaste just as we fail to understand their way of life.


On a similar theme, this article, entitled ‘no kissing please, we are Indians’, discusses how a married couple in India were arrested for kissing publicly. It then goes onto explain how Indians are so easily scandalized by on screen kisses and even tabloid splashed pictures of Indian movie stars are seen as going against traditional family values.


Bollywood, the Indian equivalent of Hollywood, is a very different type of cinema. I have seen quite a few of them, and not once have I seen a couple kiss even though almost every Bollywood movie revolves around a love story. For a while you weren’t allowed to kiss, you could touch and swoon near to each other’s mouths but kissing was forbidden. Even today some actresses have taken pledges to never kiss on screen. One actress says that she decided to take the pledge because “I belong to a traditional family and my values do not allow me to indulge in such acts."

When I hear the use of the word ‘indulge’ here it just shoots out negative connotations. She uses the word indulge like how a person indulges in chocolate ice cream when they are on a diet, or how someone indulges in sinful fantasies. Clearly if she had an onscreen kiss she would see it as sinful and disrespectful.

Honestly, to me, the Indian cinema is a breath of fresh air, especially in our western movies when frequently a couple’s relationship only becomes fully established once they have slept together. If Indians are so scandalized by an on screen kiss, imagine what they would think of our modern cinema. This is another example of how cultures do not click and in fact the article talks about the integration of western culture as ‘Westoxication’, which is clearly not seen as a positive thing.

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In this article, entitled ‘Sudan has 6,000 child soldiers’, it talks about the dehumanization of children that is occurring due to the conflict in Darfur that has been going on since 2003.

‘Nearly 700,000 children, he said, had been born and grown up knowing nothing
but war.’

This is a terrible fact to digest, and I believe is one of the saddest parts of growing up in a climate of war. The Sudanese children, even though it is illegal under Sudanese and international law to have soldiers under the age of 18, have had their childhoods taken away from them. Some grown men have trouble pulling the trigger amidst times of war and yet here, children (some as young as 11) are being made to shoot and kill without reason.


We in the western world look upon our childhood with such fondness and remember those days of unprecedented joy and freedom from being judgmental. In contrast, the children within the crisis in Darfur have had their childhoods stolen from them. They pull triggers instead of jumping ropes.


The development of child soldiers is not a new phenomenon. It has happened before, like in the 10 year civil war of Sierra Leone. The Child soldiers in that instance had a reputation for extreme cruelty, says another article. This extreme cruelty may have come from the fact that their consciouses have been tainted with blood, and not given time to fully develop before the manipulation seeps in.


This has also happened in civil wars in Uganda where children were abducted by a Ugandan insurgent group called the Lord’s Resistance Army. They were then forced to sometimes kill their own family members. Having to commit such horrific acts has long after effects on the children, for example in this article about helping child soldiers, a woman says the most important thing is to build a relationship with the child and their family. However she goes on to say that this can take a lot of time just because that child has lost the ability to trust anyone.