The purpose of this book is to document some of the famine crimes committed in Sudan, as well as to evaluate relief programmes and to identify political conditions that create famine or make its prevention possible.
Entries by Alex de Waal
This is a discussion paper concerned with some of the acute dilemmas increasingly confronted by international relief agencies concerned with “political emergencies” – often called “complex emergencies” – in Africa… This paper argues that relief organizations largely developed their current mandates during the Cold War era. These restricted mandates are less relevant to many current disasters in Africa. In expanding their mandates, however, relief agencies run a danger whereby different components of their enlarged mandates…
Most of the people who start to work for relief agencies in Africa have not bad previous experience of knowingly contributing to the suffering and death of a large number of people. Relief agencies do not tend to attract people who have this sort of experience, and they do not include it in their job descriptions when recruiting. Yet the disturbing activity of voluntarily being unpleasant to strangers is one of the most frequent activities…