In Oxford, this month, I joined other aid workers, human rights researchers, journalists, government officials and representatives of warring parties to discuss assistance to the crisis-afflicted countries of Africa. No one was expecting to resolve the issue. The idea was to discuss our common failure to do so – a failure that includes an inability to find a common language to discuss it.

If that sounds downbeat, consider the facts. Civil war, famine, endemic abuse of human rights, genocide. Millions poured into relief operations, an unrecorded proportion into the pockets of combatants or corrupt officials or extortionate transporters. Confusion and unease among donors; suffering and deception among aid recipients. By now, everyone is aware of the waste and mess in emergency relief operations, particularly in African countries. Every returning foreign relief worker knows the expression of mingled concern and scepticism with which friends and acquaintances ask such questions as: how much relief really gets to the people who need it? How much is taken by armed men? How much of the money goes on expatriate salaries and four-wheel drives?’

Here are rough answers. Respectively: some of it, a fair bit of it and about 10 per cent. But are these the right questions? Better ones might be the following: why are recurrent disasters still discussed in terms of material resources when they are mostly caused, not by natural calamity, but by chronic political failure and resultant civil conflict? Are aid agencies pursuing the link between their relief work and an understanding of power relations in the countries where they work? What is the role of western business and geostrategic interests? How do you work with the governments in a country where the main cause of the emergency is conflict over who should be in power? Is international press coverage of these countries adequate to inform the public in donor countries of such issues?

The answers are not straightforward. No one, not even those who have spent decades immersed in the problems of countries such as Sudan, Somalia, or Ethiopia can really say what should be done, citizens of those countries included. But we know that the current phase of Western intervention in this part of Africa is generally conducted in ignorance – sometimes willful ignorance – of local political processes. The international aid establishment – which some would characterize as a neo-colonial presence – has forgotten what even the colonial powers knew. As providers of material resources where there are few, aid agencies wield a power they do not acknowledge. And – because they do not acknowledge it – they are incorporated into local rivalries in a myriad of unforeseen ways. As one speaker put it: ‘Wet-behind-the-ears doctors and logisticians and aid workers are taking decisions with key political implications.’

Despite the depressing reality of emergency operations, the mood of the conference was, if not hopeful, lively. The acknowledged inadequacy of almost all such interventions has resulted in an openness to new ideas. Working alongside colleagues from the countries concerned, foreign relief workers now understand that, for people fighting for their lives, or for the right to remain on their land, humanitarian considerations are liable to be subordinated to the war effort, and that to introduce material resources in a theatre of war inevitably means that some will be grist to the war machine. Out of this paradox radical ideas emerge. Since everyone acknowledges that combatants end up consuming relief food, some now advocate feeding military forces openly. Others challenge the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. In a guerrilla war, they stress, entire communities may be engaged in the war effort; sometimes such communities are knowingly sacrificing lives in order to preserve their collective existence against a repressive government, or assert their control of natural resources, or increase their share of state power. In such circumstances humanitarian intervention that aims simply to save lives, without asking what it is saving them for, is just pissing in the wind.

There was agreement among representatives of thinking aid agencies such as Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid and CARE that an explicit engagement with local politics in the countries where they work is needed. These organisations have a problem, though, being constrained from political activity – however that may be interpreted – by the UK Charities Act.

There was plenty of criticism of media coverage of African disasters, often from journalists themselves. The news media, it was argued, were to blame for lazy explanations of political crises, the principal example being the invocation of ‘ancient tribal hatreds’ as an explanation for genocide in Rwanda, more accurately understood as a case rather of deliberate manipulation of communal conflict by a ruthless government exploiting colonial-era racial classifications.

When journalists in a conflict situation can’t make out what’s happening, said one reporter, they call it anarchy. Since they have usually arrived there only days or weeks earlier, this is quite often. Aid workers, on the other hand, often ignore or gloss over the implications of ethnic difference. Both take refuge in cant phrases such as ‘complex emergency’. And there is complicity between aid organisations and journalists. Media exposure is the lifeblood of aid agencies – a high public profile is necessary to maintain funding levels – and they are happy to host journalists. Inexperienced relief workers are treated as experts by reporters with still less knowledge. In agency-sponsored media representations, images of social breakdown, starvation and malnutrition tend to be met with stories of successful relief operations. There is little analysis of the operations that fail.

These developments in journalistic coverage of Africa are related to the decline of the area specialist; most newspapers no longer have a staff reporter stationed anywhere between Cairo and Johannesburg. Reporting of the Yugoslavia conflict shows that complex explanations can be media-friendly, but only when there is a perceived public demand, when the conflict is next door. All the experts in the world – including those at the event in Oxford – are not much use if they have no airtime. ★