Attanucci Timothy

Beth David

Brenner Summer

Breuning Olaf

Buchina William

Bunnell Dave

Coronato Petra

Croteau Jeffrey

Dantini Michele

Doutreluingne Pauline

Doy Gen

Ferrante Denise Palma

Foxwell Adam

Fresco Jacque

Gavron Assaf

Glaser Bruno

Goldwyn Mara

Green Linda

Guo-Qiang Cai

Hill Patrick

Horvitz David

Huanca Donna

Hugo Pieter

Idnert B. Zlatan

Kempenaers Jan

Lin Tao

Lu Tammy

Maisel David

Malone Alison

Maximishin Sergey

Mendoza Connie

Mitsios Apostolos

Morrison Rachael

Morton Timothy

Neutelings Jan

Nielsen Nikolaj

Oennerfors Andreas

Okón Yoshua

Patt Lise

Petrovszky Konrad

Porrati Serena

Quehenberger Susanne

Rameau Max

Rau Milo

Roc Ailen

Shapiro Alan

Situ Studio

Small Gary

Thompson Cosette

van Haarlem Dr. Michiel P.

Vanden Eynde Maarten

Walmark Ulrika

Wei Chen

EDITORIAL
Rachel de Joode
Emilie Florenkowsky
Hili Perlson
Anja Wiesinger

DESIGN
Aleksandar Todorović
CODING
Veit Wießner
Anja Wiesinger

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The Lucrative Business of Chaos and Aid By Nikolaj Nielsen

By Nikolaj Nielsen

In a destitute village somewhere deep in the Congolese forest, Dutch artist Renzo Martens unlatches two metal boxes and removes several large neon lights. His motions are deliberate, slow and choreographed. As he assembles the lights onto a wooden frame the villagers, dressed in tattered clothes, gather around curious. The sound of a generator breaks nature’s choir. Night has settled and the villagers begin to dance and sing. Renzo stares impassive. Above them in the cool glow of blue and red neon is written in English ‘Enjoy Poverty Please.’

Enjoy Poverty Please
It is a message that runs through Renzo’s 90-minute film, Episode III, filmed over two years in the Congo and completed in 2008. ‘Enjoy poverty please’ is the phrase that takes the antipodal spectator of this work into a wide moral chasm—a chasm where Renzo demands the audience to question the morality behind white smiling aid workers snapping photos of the suffering, of western photojournalists snapping photos of the dead, of a UNICEF representative attempting to explain away all the logos slapped onto the blue and white tarpaulin meant to protect the displaced from sun and rain.

Pouring from this moral chasm is the extraordinary wealth of poverty. It is also a place where predominately white aid workers are either unwilling or unable to confront a harrowing question: could humanitarian aid possibly perpetuate the cycle of war and misery? Could poverty possibly be just another commodity, traded, bought and sold like gold, coltan or diamonds on the international market?

Consider this. The Congo’s combined annual profit from gold, coltan and diamonds in 2008 was less than the foreign donated aid revenue generated the same year from those huddled, shivering and trembling with fear, beneath a UNICEF tarpaulin. At the bottom of this moral chasm are the destitute, where they have always been, and where they slave away at pittance pay for impossible jobs, denied access to education and basic rights. At the top looking down are the wealthy government officials, humanitarian relief organizations, and a Western public whose conscious is loosely dressed with morality, human rights, and justice but whose demands for inexpensive products condemns the working poor to utter poverty.

Poverty as a Product
Episode III opens with a scene of a wiry man chopping away with a machete at thick jungle bush throughout a field that literally stretches beyond the horizon. He is meant to clear it. It is an atrocious task that pays him a pitiful 50 cents for three days of work. “We are suffering,” he says as he points to all the brush. “What can I do?” he adds and continues to hack away in frustration. He works for Groupe Blattner Elwyn, a European-run consortium of palm oil and coffee plantations, that Renzo later revisits in his film.

“It is the poor who should benefit from poverty,” Renzo said in an interview with TV2Africa in May, 2010. “The film is a portrait of power relationship,” he explained, adding that poverty is a commercial enterprise in what Richard Dawden, Director of the Royal African Society in London, likens to an “aid agency supermarket.” The problem, according to Renzo, is the spoils of poverty are flowing in the wrong direction. Certain corporations and multi-nationals exploit the poor. Few would argue against that. The poor in the Congo represent cheap labour in an environment that lacks decent working standards and labor rights. The end-result is cheaper produce on the world market. Again, few would argue against that.

But Renzo goes further. His film argues that humanitarian relief agencies and government officials also exploit the poverty of refugees and internally displaced persons. The business model for these organizations and individuals is based on poverty and conflict. Without conflict, without poverty, some of these people and organizations would be without jobs and so it is in their interest, acknowledged or not, to guarantee the cycle. It is a heterodox argument that discloses bold truths.

Renzo wants to usurp the status quo and reverse the power relation. His cynical perspective is meant to encourage the poor to brand, package and market their own misery like products on a supermarket shelf. They should be the ones taking photos of emaciated babies. The logos on the tarpaulin should belong to them. They should be the ones selling compassion to distant populations whose perceptions of Africa have been distorted and reduced down to the crude terms of corruption, disease, war and backwardness.

It is an intriguing promulgation that he could have pursued even further. But he doesn’t, for instance, fully challenge humanitarian relief workers on the premise of his film. He doesn’t directly challenge the white photojournalists either, who document and bear witness to events unfolding in the darkest hours of humanity. Instead, Renzo takes the viewer through a handful of scenarios that depict power relations between the haves and the have-nots. He shows the suffering of the working poor at a palm oil and coffee plantation. He follows white Italian photojournalists from AFP as they take photos of rotting corpses and then explain the marketing rationale behind their work. He convinces local Congolese photographers to emulate their white colleagues and snap photos of starving children instead of weddings and celebrations. He runs into a MSF caravan that is inexplicably leaving a region populated by malnourished children. He traverses, by canoe and by foot, through the Congo with his neon sign ‘Enjoy poverty please.’

Yet his attempts to empower the poor to ‘own’ their misery fail to make a significant impact–except maybe on several incredulous audience members of his film. And perhaps rightfully so. Renzo, in a benign fashion, is guilty of the very act he condemns. He too is basing his work as an artist on the poverty of others. He too enters the lives of the desperate until he is satisfied with his scene, his shot, and his moment. The wisp of encounters he leaves behind will not fade the misery of the poor. They will remain where he had found them and when he returns to Europe, he can place his work in an art gallery and have intellectuals attempt to decipher Freudian references to id, ego, and superego. If anything, lingering memories of distraught black faces may instead haunt his consciousness. Still, he has the courage to admit his entitlements vis-à-vis poverty. Near the end of the film he confesses that he, too, is capable of vanity. But unlike the journalists and the humanitarian relief workers, Renzo’s work does not portend righteousness or make claims to do good. It simply reveals.

Compassion Fatigue
Renzo’s stoic behavior in face of extreme poverty and his detached but poignant questioning of the injustice stand in stark contrast to the normal media blitz and marketing campaigns that play on the conscience and emotions of its carefully targeted audience: us.

Renzo, however, does disclose certain uncomfortable truths. He insightfully depicts the casual relation between poverty, media, and humanitarian aid. It is an apotropaic relation that Dutch journalist Linda Polman argues in her book, Crisis Caravan, essentially undermines viable long-term solutions to war. A relation that feeds into what Susan D. Moeller, Director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda, describes as the unacknowledged consequence of peripheral journalism and humanitarian aid marketing machines on the general public. Another starving baby. Another famine. Another war. No context. No depth. No understanding. But plenty of compassion fatigue.

In 1984, BBC journalist Michael Buerk opened the world’s eyes to skeletal Ethiopian children dying en masse. Live Aid was launched, over USD 100 million was raised and donated, and six years later the same famine in the same place was repeated. But the picture of the starving baby could no longer provoke the same outrage it did in 1984. The connection between stimulation and an emotive response, or what Walter Benjamin described as the ‘aura’ of an image, had been severed. Aid agencies were aghast. An apathetic public does not pressure donors and governments to fill the aid agency coffer. Something unspeakable, much more insidious and horrible would need to happen to shock the public into emptying their wallets.

Then came Rwanda. By the time genocide had been pronounced, 20% of its population had been hacked to death. The ‘refugees’ poured into the city of Goma where a camp erected by aid agencies fed and nursed back to health between 10 000 to 20 000 Hutu extremists and murderers who then returned to Rwanda to finish off the job (Polman). The around 250 NGOs and international aid agencies in Goma kept silent with one exception–the French branch of Médecins sans Frontiers left Goma in disgust in 1994. “Far from contributing to a solution, aid only perpetuates the situation in Goma,” wrote France MSF in a newsletter addressed to their donors (Polman).

Supporting Despots and Killers
When Renzo made this film in 2008, the Congo had received nearly USD 2 billion in aid. In 2010, according to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report, institutional donor aid peaked at USD 16.7 billion–the highest level ever recorded. NGOs received 17.3 percent of institutional humanitarian aid. Private funding added another USD 4 billion. MSF received USD 1.1 billion last year in private donations alone, more than the UK’s entire 2010 aid budget. Yet the misery continues.

“The humanitarian aid system is broken,” said John Forsyth, CEO of Save the Children earlier this year, adding that “humanitarian aid does not produce any long term benefit. It is easier for an organization to prove it had dealt with an emergency rather averted one,” he said adding that only two of the top 20 recipients of international humanitarian aid have moved out of the emergency phase in the past five years. In some cases, humanitarian aid is used for political ends and by host governments to coerce its citizens.

“To whom belongs poverty?” Renzo asks a handful of Congolese men in the film. They are gathered beneath a straw gazebo in an impoverished village. They listen intently. He then writes on a white board, “If we can sell it, it is important to know who the boss is.” Below the phrase he then writes, “Poverty brings money, riches. Poverty is a resource.” The resulting humanitarian not only brings riches, it is also a tool used to coerce and manipulate opposition.

A joint undercover investigation by BBC’s Newsnight and the bureau of investigative journalism at London’s City University published this August found Ethiopia’s government using foreign aid-funded "capacity-building" programs ‘to indoctrinate schoolchildren, intimidate teachers and purge the civil service of people with independent political views.’ Their investigation confirmed an extensive 2010 Human Rights Watch report, “Ethiopia: Donor Aid Supports Repression” that shows how donor-supported resources and aid is used as a tool to consolidate the power of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. Ethiopia is one of the world’s top recipients of humanitarian aid. The EU has so far given the region over EUR 200 million in aid with further funding promised.

The Horror
Celebrated English nurse Florence Nightingale, writes Linda Polman in Crisis Caravan, opposed humanitarian aid and relief right from the start. When in 1863, Swiss philanthropist Henry Dunant launched the world’s first-ever international volunteer humanitarian relief organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Nightingale made her views known to the public.

Dunant had convinced governments that reducing the number of cripples on the battlefield would ease their burden on the state. It was economically justifiable and it teased the imaginations of many people with noble and good intentions. Nobody should have to suffer, argued Dunant. Good or bad, everyone should have the right to proper medical attention. Indeed, around the same time Dunant was making his case, the great American educator Horace Mann said “Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.” These were powerful words. But at that time, war was mostly fought among and between professional soldiers. Nightingale reasoned that the very nature of war and conflict would change via relief organizations and pro-active volunteers doing their personal part for humanity. And it frightened her. “By easing the burden on war, war ministries would make waging war more attractive,” argued Nightingale (Polman).

Today, wars suck in the civilian population who too often shoulder the onslaught. In its annual report, ‘People Under Threat,’ the Minority Rights Group International says the number of civilian killed in conflicts has reached unprecedented levels. Less than 5 percent of World War I victims were civilians. The United Nations estimates 90 percent of those killed today are civilians of whom the vast majority is women, children and the elderly.

If the bullets don’t kill them, then ensuing disease, lack of water and famine will. And if that doesn’t work then the refugee camps, like Goma that nursed an army of Interahamwe back to health to continue their slaughter of Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda, will. No questions asked because neutrality and impartiality is sacrosanct to humanitarian relief organizations.

Dunant’s ICRC used impartiality and neutrality as arguments to not notify the world of the atrocities being committed by Nazis throughout its death camps. It was later revealed that the ICRC had been aware of these camps by as early as 1942. They knew about the ovens, the forced labor and death by starvation and torture. But they chose to remain impartial and neutral. François Bugnion, the ICRC’s Director for International Law and Cooperation within the Movement, describes that moment in ICRC as a badge of shame.

“These actions are not negligible, since every life saved is priceless, but they cannot obscure the fact that, overall, the ICRC’s efforts were a failure,” he says. “Yet the failure was, above all, that of the ICRC’s inability—or unwillingness—to fully recognize the extent of the tragedy that was unfolding, and to confront it by reversing its priorities and taking the risks that the situation demanded”.

The same neutrality and impartiality that prevented the ICRC to inform early on what was happening in the concentration camps was also used by humanitarian agencies and NGOs in Goma to justify healing, feeding and funding the Hutu militia. As the Interahamwe marched into the open arms of the awaiting humanitarian relief organizations, they carried with them the spoils of war, bloodied machetes, axes and Kalashnikovs. The Hutu government in Goma even levied a ‘war tax’ on all aid agencies and used the money to fund its ragtag army.

By the time the Tutsi army finally torched the camp to the ground, aid agencies had erected 2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 590 shops, 60 hair salons, 50 pharmacies, 30 tailors, 25 butcher shops, 5 blacksmiths, 3 cinemas, 2 hotels and a slaughterhouse in Goma alone (Polman). The aid agencies provided the Interahamwe with entertainment, jobs, health and the infrastructure that turned the camp into a thriving town. And we, the West, provided the aid agencies with millions upon millions of USD to run the camp. In the meantime, Tutsi and moderate Hutus received nothing—except the futile efforts of General Romée Dallane, commander of the tiny UN force in Kigali to protect what he could. “Even as millions in humanitarian aid was flown into Goma we could not get a few thousand dollars to help Kigali,” said Dallane (Polman).

Renzo’s Trail of Errors
There is a scene in Episode III that shows Renzo walking down a long narrow trail. In front and behind him are workers of Groupe Blattner Elwyn. The scene continues at the worker’s quarters where the man who had been hacking away at the forest brush for pittance pay presents Renzo his family. Their living conditions are deplorable. In a pot of boiling water, his wife stirs in a bundle of leaves. His son gnaws away at the raw meat of a small rodent, peeling back the fur to reveal the red flesh.

His daughter, her knees pulled close to her chest, sits silent in complete darkness. “She doesn’t sleep,” says her father who has been toiling away the plantation for the past ten years. She is seriously ill with visible ichorescent infections on her face, feet and buttocks. “They are actually worse off than those who have no jobs,” a village doctor who makes regular visits tells Renzo. “Most of the plantation worker children are malnourished,” he adds.

Later on in the film, Renzo visits the family a second time and offers them a feast. He serves them large chucks of beef and a bowl of vegetables. The little girl finds the strength to eat the meat and for a brief moment she smiles. Her father stands next to her and thanks Renzo as if he had been some kind of savior. Renzo looks at him and says they should all appreciate their poverty and find happiness in it. Poverty is their lot and so long as we the West desire to feed our vanities, erect institutions and relief agencies to brand our moral shibboleths to the world, and demand inexpensive products, the poor shall remain shackled to the bottom of the chasm.

Just before the family ends their meal, we see Renzo sewing a logo of the European Commission onto the tattered shirt of the ailing little girl. The father, perplexed, eats the last piece of meat.