THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
The recent detainment of People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy by Egyptian authorities is not quite in the same league as that of Cork woman Deirdre Murphy (70) held for over a week by Israeli forces. She had been volunteering with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) when arrested.
However, neither case compares to the daily threat aid workers face globally. In 2023 – the latest figures available – 598 aid workers were subjected to violent attacks, of which 293 were killed, 214 injured and 91 kidnapped. The toll is the highest in the last 12 years, according to the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG). The most violent places to be on the ground at the moment are – Palestine apart – Sudan and Somalia.
But it’s not always that obvious who the enemy is, as with Greta Thunberg whose yacht carrying aid to Gaza was intercepted by Israeli forces. Similarly, some years back, Belfast Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan and Mayo electrician Derek Graham were arrested by Israelis who boarded their ship sailing to Gaza. Their cargo, including medical supplies, was confiscated but the pair were eventually released with 19 others.
Death, disease, destruction. What makes thousands of people — and some times for years on end — take up the task of putting their lives on the frontline for relative strangers?
There are those who argue that the doings of aid workers is counter-productive. That they turn people in places like Africa into almost institutionalised begging bowls. Or there’s the argument that most of the aid that Live Aid intended for Ethiopia never got to those who most needed it and ended up rotting in the neighbouring port of Djibouti. And that, despite all the good intentions and mass world appeal, famine has returned to stalk the land-locked country many times since.
The writer Paul Theroux – father of Louis – in Dark Star Safari, a wonderful epic read of going overland from Cairo to Cape Town, is critical of NGOs and talks of the “do-gooders who infest Africa’’. People who “tool around in new white Land Rovers playing CD music’’.
It’s strong condemnation. In January 2008 I covered the post-election political violence in Kenya. I was sitting in a backroom bar one evening in an old colonial hotel, housing the world’s media, in Eldoret in the Great Rift Valley. I was awaiting a green light from the UN that it was safe to travel further into the valley where most of the killings were taking place, when a 4×4 carrying young
American women arrived. They were ‘freelance’ aid workers — for hire at $500 a day by the various NGOs to supplement their people on the ground when a conflict zone goes into red alert.
I was away from the relative safety of Eldoret for the next day and night and when I returned to that backroom bar, these young volunteers were still sitting, more or less, where I had left them. They told me their contractors World Vision had advised them to stay put for safety reasons.
To the best of my knowledge they never did leave that back-room bar for the duration of their ‘hire’ in Kenya. But, boy, could they discuss the many ways of resolving Kenya’s political woes over a cold Keroro or two.
Aid workers have their own reasons for signing up, and not all of them necessarily egalitarian, but I cannot help but contrast the Americans in Eldoret with a young West of Ireland girl I met in Medellin, Colombia 20 years ago when undercover during the time of The IRA Three, charged by the Bogota rightwing government with training the leftwing FARC guerrillas.
She had a degree from Galway in international politics. It was her first day, after weeks of intense training, on the ground with Peace Brigades International (PBI) in probably then the most dangerous country in the world. The PBI was set up during the Nicaraguan conflict in 1983. They are unique in that their work is to walk, like a guardian angel, alongside people who have been targeted for assassination by rightwing death-squads, leftists guerrillas, narcos or government agents (take your pick), in an un-armed and peaceful show of solidarity in the hope of keeping their charge alive.
They are the bravest people I have met.
I asked her how she was? “Fine”
How did she feel? “Scared, unsure…”
“Why do you do it? Put your life on the line … for complete strangers?’’
Her answer came quick and unfailing. “Someone has to do it … don’t they?’’
