Now that I’m in MY sixties the bedside radio’s ‘sleep’ button allows me ninety minutes of BBC World Service as I surrender to the arms of Morpheus (rather than those of ‘Er In Bed) and its alarm wakes me at 5.45am for moos and news: Farming Today, followed by the Today programme.
I may flirt with Radio Three and Classic FM when the world grows depressing from time to time, ; in-car dalliances range from ‘easy listening’ (i.e. more of the Beatles years) to Radio Newcastle or a bit of Borders. But, by and large, the BBC World Service is the bedrock upon which this old boy’s broadcast experience is founded.
Which is why I reacted with alarm to a World Service news report, deep in the small hours one day last week, that 95 per cent of the millions raised in Britain to feed starving Ethiopians after the 1985 famine might well have been redirected into the greedy pockets of fat middlemen, or used to buy weapons of war.
I wasn’t the only one to experience a sickening sensation: the claims by a first-class BBC reporter, Martin Plaut, and subsequently defended by well-known broadcaster Rageh Omar - both of whom spent years in Ethiopia - enraged the prickly Sir Bob ‘Band Aid’ Geldof, the sincerity of whose dedication to that nation’s plight can surely not be doubted.
My own, much more modest, interest in the allegations can be explained by the fact that ten years after Geldof’s incredible humanitarian effort I visited Tigray province in northern Ethiopia to ensure that funds raised by Daily Mirror readers had been used to supply the clinics, drugs and medical staff for which they were intended.
A former Mirror editor, I was by this time Mirror Group’s editorial director; if it is of any reassurance to Sir Bob I visited the ‘Mirror’ clinics, met the doctors and nurses and discussed and communicated back to London their needs for continued medical supplies.
My hosts, the charity Relief Society of Tigray (REST), satisfied me that they were doing wonderful work with the UK funds that were channelled through them; nonetheless, I was dimly aware of REST’s connections with the Tigray rebel army that had defeated Ethiopia’s Marxist former president, a despot called Mengistu who had used food and medical supplies as a weapon with which to control the people.
The BBC puts it rather more firmly, akin to the political relationship between, say, Sinn Fein and the IRA: “REST was,” says Omar, “undeniably the humanitarian wing of the rebel movement”.
The hard choice facing aid providers like Band Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children and even the Mirror was stark: either deal through REST and risk some of the money being illicitly (and, arguably, understandably) siphoned off to fight the dictator, or refuse and watch millions starve.
Has anything changed? Sadly, no: last night the World Service awakened me once more at 3am with a leaked UN security council report that half the food aid sent to feed hundreds of thousands of starving Somalians is being stolen by corrupt contractors, radical Islamic militants and local UN workers.
The Ethiopian allegations obviously worried my old colleagues at the Mirror as much as they did me; despite their confidence that all is still well, “not least because of your own eyewitness evidence that there were physical buildings and functioning clinics” they are continuing to make checks.
Bob Geldof’s anger at the World Service reports of chicanery and thieving - a classic case of shooting the messenger, if ever there was one - stems from his fear that we, the ground level donors who respond so generously to disaster appeals worldwide, will take fright, grow cynical and close our purses.
Please don’t.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, March 12, 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment