NO OPTION BUT TO PROVIDE AID IN ZAIRE

From Ms. Emma Bonino.

Sir, I have read with interest Michela Wrong's article criticising the role of humanitarian aid in the Great Lakes Region ("Killing with kidness", December 3). For the sake of Keeping open a healthy debate on this delicate issue, I would like to offer a few comments, from the perspective of one of the world's largest donors of humanitarian aid, Echo (European Community Humanitarian Office).

Let me say from the outset that I am not joing in any breast-beatinf about the way we have allocated our funding. Saving lives and alleiating human suffering is a universal value itself and is never a worthless exercise.

On the other hand, humanitarian aid can never, ever, be a substitute for political or military solutions to complex crisies. As far as the Great Lakes crisis is concerned the humanitarian community has unstintingly tried to draw the attention of the international community to the absolute need for a political settlement to defuse the conflict.

It is not the job of humanitarian organisations, administering aid to the needy, to double up as military strategist, or to sort out who's a genocidal killer and who is a "real" refugee. Killers must be brought to justice; we have said this over and over agin for more than two years. But I do not see what the alternative to providing aid could have been in the refugee camps of east Zaire. Non-governmental organisations and agencies did not create the needs there, they just did what they had to do.

Should we have abandoned the refugees to their fate? And if so, when?

Humanitarian aid operations have certainly expanded dramatically recently. But it is too simplicistic to say that aid agencies have cynically abandoned development for more glamorous emergency work for which money flows more freely. The fact is, crises involving conflict in which development it crushed and civilians are the main victims have proliferated. We have simply helped to feed people in need, while the world's indifference continues to feed crises. Emergency aid replaces development in places (such as Somalia and Liberia) where development policies are no longer possible.

We should all try and learn the lessons of ongoing crises in the Great Lakes and elsewhere amid this modern butcher of people principles and international conventions. Are politicians and diplomats learning their lessons too? We are right to be concerned about civilians whose plighgt we could not witness because access to thel was denied in a massive violation of human rights. They are pawns in a war between totally unaccountable forces.

I am still convinced that a multinational force is absolutely essential to oblige warring factions to give access to those people, however many or few they may be, however many too few square miles we are talking about. If that sounds strident, so be it.