I have just seen this and thought I would post it on here as it is shocking and has quotations from Medicine sans Frontier people and others who have witnessed the situation. It's something every individual who is roped into charity issues should think about before allowing the urge to do good to obscure the urge to do ill that might underlie the very thing used to make things better.
[This story, written by Robert Keating, was originally published in the July 1986 issue of SPIN. In honor of SPIN’s 30th anniversary, we’ve republished this piece as part of our ongoing “30 Years, 30 Stories”series.]
The truth is shocking in its clarity. “People are dying because of their government,” says Jason Clay, an anthropologist studying famine in Ethiopia. “And what groups like Live Aid are doing is helping the government set up a system that is going to cause people to die for decades to come.”
“Western governments and humanitarian groups like Live Aid are fueling an operation that will be described with hindsight in a few years time as one of the greatest slaughters in the history of the twentieth century,” says Dr. Claude Malhuret, whose relief agency, Medicins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), has been kicked out of Ethiopia for speaking up against “the most massive violations of human rights we have seen in recent years.”