Aid and Development Archive

Once again, the news from Burma rings with echoes of despair. The latest mission from the international community has ended in embarrassment — not for the despotic generals who rule Burma (renamed Myanmar by its illegitimate regime), but for the United Nations and its ineffectual efforts. It seems no one who matters wants to waste any more time meeting with the U.N. envoy. And now, unconfirmed reports say the iconic leader of the pro-democracy opposition, the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, may have started a hunger strike. Once again, Burma stands like a conscience-searing mirage on the Asian horizon, […]

Moments of candor from sub-Saharan African politicians are rare, but they do occur. Near the end of 2005, Eriya Kategaya, then a former cabinet minister in Uganda, criticized the role of Western donors in supporting the personal rule of leaders like Yoweri Museveni. “Hinging the destiny of a country to an individual is absolutely not correct,” he said. Granted, Kategaya, once again a cabinet minister, delivered his lament while temporarily ejected from Uganda’s ruling party for opposing Museveni’s push to erase presidential term limits. But that should not blunt his analysis. The West and its development industry have serially backed […]

ELDORET, Kenya — As he stands amid the rows of mud-strewn tents, Eliud Njoroge recounts a familiar tale in the narrative of this country’s recent post-election crisis. Njoroge, an ethnic Kikuyu, had lived for 32 years in the Kalenjin town of Soy, a stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition candidate in last December’s presidential election. When violence erupted following the contested victory of the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, Njoroge’s house was burned by machete-wielding youth, and his life threatened by neighbors who demanded that he and his family return to Central Province, the Kikuyu ancestral homeland, where they’d never […]

ABOARD THE U.S.S. KEARSARGE — There was something strange about the U.S.S. Kearsarge amphibious assault ship as she left Norfolk, Virginia, last week for a four-month South American cruise. Instead of the usual solid ranks of white-clad sailors lining her huge flight deck, the size of two football fields, there were hundreds of military medical personnel in the green, blue, gray or tan uniforms of the Canadian Army, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force and the Brazilian and Dutch militaries — not to mention scores of civilian aid workers in blue jeans and t-shirts. For decades, the U.S. Navy’s […]