“Haiti doesn’t have a voice. It doesn’t have an identity. We, Haitians, need to take back the role of storytellers and tell our own history.” This was one of the reasons for filmmaker Raoul Peck to follow the reconstruction efforts in his home country after the earthquake in January 2010. Peck emphasizes that he was not planning on filming crying women and dead bodies in the streets. His goal was to challenge the country’s role of victim and turn the cameras on those who normally do the storytelling and the observing.

The result is the documentary “Fatal Assistance” (Assistance Mortelle), a painful 100-minute exposé on how international development and humanitarian aid have gone bad. It is a story about well-intentioned donors and aid organizations that have lost themselves in rituals of red tape, having become the inefficient players of a rudderless multinational aid-industry. Last week the documentary had its American premiere during the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in cooperation with the Margaret Mead Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival. Peck himself was available for questions after the screening and I had access to an earlier interview that Peck had given to a crew from Haiti Reporters before the film’s first screening in Haiti.

Peck has documented the efforts of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) that was created shortly after the earthquake. With the Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive and Bill Clinton as its co-presidents, the IHRC was tasked to oversee the spending of billions of dollars of international assistance in a way that was in alignment with the concerns of Haitians and the Haitian government. It was not new to see that after more than two years of “reconstruction,” too many Haitians are still living in extremely poor living conditions. Or, to quote a man who has lost his house in the earthquake, “in houses that the donors wouldn’t even let their dog live in.” It was new to see a two-hour indictment of those who try to help. The main critiques are that the international organizations left the Haitians and its government out of equation and that subsequently, too much of the money has been spent in terribly inefficient and non-transparent ways.

Economic rules that have long been proven to work elsewhere have been ignored and turned on their head. One example is the problem of NGOs that keep prices and salaries artificially high because it is in the interest of their organizations and their donors, while it ruins the workings of the local market economy and destroys incentives. Another painful phenomenon is the urge and conviction of many do-gooders that this moment in history will be Haiti’s finest hour to start with a clean slate, and en passant can function as a laboratory for people’s craziest ideas. As Priscilla Phelps, an American adviser on housing and neighborhood reconstruction explains in the film, “We’re dealing with what people can think of in their wildest dreams. We had an offer for the development of plastic houses. Plastic houses? But it is not only houses but people come with all kinds of products and ideas!”

Media have long been reinforcing the frame of Haiti as the ultimate example of a failed country. Raoul Peck is tired of the endless refrain that the country is too corrupt, its government too weak and its citizens too helpless. In his film, Peck points the accusing finger at the international organizations, Clinton’s organization chiefly among them, but he lets the Haitian government easily get away without much critical questioning. Only one of the heroes in the film, the Head of Sanitation in Port-au-Prince, squarely puts blame on both the local government and foreign helpers for the overall lack of progress. It causes the film to lose some of its strength and begs the question if this was the trade-off for Peck after getting such extensive access to filming the former prime minister and President René Préval. Interestingly, after the showing in Port-au-Prince, many Haitians were critical of Peck for giving the former Haitian government carte blanche.

While not during the documentary, in interviews Peck admits that corruption in Haiti certainly is a problem, but he says it cannot be used as an excuse. In the meantime, the atmosphere in the streets of Port-au-Prince and among Haitians and the foreign visitors isn’t changing for the better. At a recent conference on investing in Haiti, the Haitian crowd answered a berating of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) practices with cheers and applause. During a walk in the neighborhood of Delmas in Haiti, you will hear young kids at the market place yell at foreigners, “go back to your own country,” and many a disillusioned aid worker is wondering if they have overstayed their welcome.

With his film, Peck wishes to start a discussion, which should have started years ago. And it is not only about Haiti. Of course, discussions about a better approach to foreign aid have been brewing for at least ten years. Economists Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly represent the two main camps between a more clinically planned strategy and a local market based approach to foreign assistance. Peck, clearly closer to Easterly, pleads for stronger involvement of the people for whom the assistance is organized in the first place. Peck: “If all these NGOs would have been private companies, they would long have been shut down, and their CEOs would have landed in prison. …We have sixty years of experience of development work. The current approach doesn’t work. It needs to stop.”

The great changes in the Middle East didn’t come from the usual sources. Religion was not nearly as important as many expected.  Class was far from the center of the action, as youth stole the show.  And internationally backed civil society was not nearly as important as Western donors would hope. In fact, Western aid may have been more of the problem than the solution.

Religion

The Islamic movement, in particular in Egypt, is in a state of relative weakness, very much connected to economic change. When Egypt embarked on structural adjustment programs and started privatizing its state-owned enterprises in the late 1970s, the economic reform was a façade, masking the enrichment of a handful of high-ranking officials who were the only ones who could do business. In the process, state and welfare services were dismantled, and the regime encouraged non-governmental charities. In this context, the Ikhwan (the Arabic name for Muslim Brotherhood) was able to build many private mosques and new charitable organizations, leading to significant social support. Yet, in the 1990s, when the Ikhwan started running for elections (culminating with the 20% of the seats in 2005), it paid the price of this political engagement by having no choice but to let people close to the government gradually take control over their charities. The movement became complexly connected to the regime and began to lose its credibility, increasingly so when it refused to boycott the 2005 elections and, more recently, because it took on positions that were viewed negatively by the viewpoints of the lower classes. One example is the Ikhwan’s condemnation of the strikes of Muhalla al-Kubra in the textile sector in 6 April 2008. Similar anti-union positions from Islamists are documented in Gaza and Yemen, creating a rift between the working class and the Islamists. Interestingly, in his 2005 book the sociologist Patrick Haenni, calls this new strand of Muslim businessmen ‘the promoters of Islam of the Market.’

As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood has become both politically and socially a much more fragile actor than it was in the past. Only the lack of alternative opposition and the regime’s stigmatization of the Ikhwan as a Taliban-like movement kept an otherwise fragmenting organization united. Daniela Pioppi has explained this with great detail and accuracy in her article, Is There an Islamist Alternative in Egypt?.

Class

The traditional sociological force of class was present but not at the center of the recent struggles. Although the main trade union in Tunisia played the role of an important triggering agent of the revolt, it was a loose combination of educated people and liberal professionals, such as lawyers and doctors, who gave the decisive boost to the popular protests. The same can be said of Yemen. To be sure, the class dimension should not be written off completely, as the daily strikes and newly formed trade unions in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak show. But another factor, the use of Internet and other media technology is overshadowing the old-fashioned influences.

Youth

A girl in Benghazi holding a paper, it reads:"Tribes of Libya are one group" © Maher 2777 | Wikimedia Commons

Especially significant is the young age of the new media-savvy protesters. More than half of the population in the Middle East is below the age of 25. And many of these young people are disgruntled for several reasons. One cause is their struggle to land a real job after earning their degrees. Mohamed Bouazizi epitomized the ordeal of this generation. He was the Tunisian street vendor in the small town of Sidi Bouzid who set himself on fire last December,

Another reason of the youth’s unhappiness is their disillusionment with Islamist ideology.  An insightful article appeared in the New York Times (NYT on Imbaba) on a slum in Cairo where the Ikhwan gradually lost control over the local youth.  In Egypt, the old Ikhwan leadership procrastinated its decision to join the first main protests on Tahrir square on 25 January. Its youth wing eventually participated, but the organization was in the hands of the trade unions and the youth. Also, in the Palestinian territories we see how the younger generation is growing resentful of the political games played by both Hamas and the nationalist party Fatah.  The young have also been fed up with the opportunistic behavior of the left and their NGO partners. And this brings us to the third factor that has made the outbursts in the Middle East unique.

N.G.O.s and International Aid

I believe Western aid has had a negative impact on the development of democracy in the region, even when it apparently is meant to support this development.  It negatively affects the formal civil society as aid both promotes and excludes.

It promotes a professionalized form of activism, which has been lost when it comes to the extraordinary and spontaneity of the demonstrations. Aid also contributes to exclude those resisting both the institutional and discursive isomorphic pressure, by encouraging a managerial version of civil society. You want to receive money as a civil society organization? Then you have to speak the same language and buzzwords as donors and also be a fully institutionalized organization, matching donor standards. But once you have done that, you are more like a business, than an organization able to respond to the autonomous and fluid claims of your constituency.

To be sure, aid for democratization and civil society is only one tiny portion of the overall envelope of aid disbursed to the region – for Egypt, Yemen or Palestine. Here are some data to illustrate my point: between 1971 and 2001, the US has given about $145 billion of aid to the Near East, the vast majority to Israel (79 billion) and Egypt (52 billion) (see February 2009 and June 2010 reports for the Congress). Aid becomes a tool to support strategic interests (stability for and around Israel being in this case is the top priority). The ideals of democracy, empowerment, human rights, etc. are only nice words wrapped around the Realpolitik nature of US aid.

Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat in Camp David © Bill Fitz-Patrick | Wikimedia Commons

After signing a peace treaty with Israel at the Camp David agreement in 1978, Egypt has received large annual envelops of aid from the USA. In the last ten years, Egypt has cashed in an average of $1.3 billion per year, 85% of which is military aid. The same is true for the Palestinian territories, where the US with the EU support increasingly subsidize the West Bank Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Budgetary support means that (western) governments are paying the PNA employees, about half of whom are police and security forces.  Rather than supporting autonomy, this type of aid increases Palestinian dependency.

This source of aid is focused on security matters out of fear that the State itself could become the object of predation by non-state actors. The threat of Islamic fundamentalism or Al-Qaeda, as in Yemen and now in Libya, is usually invoked to justify such a high level of aid for security purpose only.  Perhaps now that Qaddafi has also accused al-Qaeda of orchestrating the revolts in Libya, we will realize the vacuous nature of such arguments.

The result of this aid pattern leads to a form of Bonapartism, a regime with a very strong executive largely ignoring the legislature and based on very strong police.  The aid actively contributed to this kind of regime in and around Egypt as Juan Cole, in a blog last month, explained in detail:

“The US-backed military dictatorship in Egypt … exercises power on behalf of both a state elite and a new wealthy business class, some members of which gained their wealth from government connections and corruption. The Egypt of the Separate Peace, the Egypt of tourism and joint military exercises with the United States, is also an Egypt ruled by the few for the benefit of the few.”

Unless we see another revolution (in the approach of the main donors to the region), western aid is likely to thwart the self-organization of these extraordinary popular movements and kill the spontaneity of the counter-power of civil society.