January 20, 2014: The UN, Red Cross and thousands of other foreign aid organizations are having a harder time raising money, in large part because they are having an even harder time dealing with the growing revelations about the extent to which foreign aid is stolen after arriving in the countries where it is needed. The plundering has gone on for so long that the thieves have gotten greedy and sloppy. For example, the refugees from the 1960s-70s war in southern Morocco (West Sahara) decades ago are still sitting in Algeria supported by foreign aid. But it’s become increasingly obvious that, while the aid organizations are regularly providing aid for 120,000 refugees there are only about 40,000 real refugees in the camps. The rest of the aid goes to make a few Polisario (the rebel group that runs the camp) leaders and Algerian officials millionaires and many more underlings wealthier. For years people who lived in the camp have casually told outsiders, including reporters, details of how aid is stolen and resold and deals made with air officials to keep the loot coming.

The Palestinian aid scams are increasingly being documented, in part because Palestinian leadership has been split since 2007 between Fatah and Hamas and partisans for both groups are willing to offer up details of the misbehavior of their rivals. Israel has been complaining about this aid abuse for decades and now Palestinians are corroborating, in detail, many of the Israeli charges. This puts increasing pressure on donor nations to push Palestinian leadership. Some donors are not bothering with that and have simply stopped giving.

Now there are over three million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan and the plundering is already underway despite the obvious suffering of so many of those in the camps. Moreover cell phones make it easier to document and expose the theft. No wonder the UN is having a hard time raising the $6.5 billion is says is needed to keep the camps going.

The UN, and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are also in big trouble because of unruly refugee camps. It’s not just the thieves, but other types of criminals as well. The Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are increasingly out of control because this. Aid groups operate under the protection of local security forces, but as is often the case the locals are unable or unwilling to supply sufficient police or troops to keep the peace in these instant cities created by the aid organizations. While the Turks can mobilize sufficient additional forces to keep the camps peaceful this is not the case in Lebanon and especially Jordan because both nations have long had too much unrest and not enough money for a lot of police.

Aid groups are also beginning to confront the harmful side effects of their good works. The worst side effect is how rebels and gangsters sustain themselves by stealing food and other aid supplies, as well as robbing the NGO workers themselves. Usually the main complaint is the increasing attacks on aid workers. In the worst cases aid workers are assaulted or robbed and that eventually escalates to some getting killed. This is a trend that has been on the march upward for several decades. Islamic radicals have been particularly active in terrorizing and killing the foreigners who are there to help them. Aid workers are usually caught between different factions within the refugee camps. All factions see the aid groups as a source of income and supplies.

In the case of Syria there are also problems with Sunni Islamic radicals keen on chasing out all non-Moslem foreigners. The refugee camps for Syrians are particularly vexed by criminal gangs that prey on everyone, especially the women. The rebel groups recruit teenage boys to fight or, in the case of Islamic radical groups, to be suicide bombers (called “birds of paradise”). Younger boys are often sexually exploited (a common problem throughout the region).

At the core of this problem is not the UN (the largest organizer of aid efforts) but the concept of NGOs in general. A good example of how this works occurred a decade ago, when the Afghan government threatened to expel all NGOs (non-governmental organizations) from the country. The NGOs were accused of failing to get aid programs moving and spending aid money to further their own ends. The NGOs in Afghanistan controlled over a billion dollars in foreign aid each year, and the government was simply joining many Afghans in complaining about the NGOs being more concerned about their own safety and comfort than in making the lives of Afghans better.

It's not as simple as that.

NGOs are, for the most part, charitable organizations that take money from individuals, organizations, and governments and use it for charitable work in foreign countries. The Red Cross is one of the oldest and best known NGOs (dating back to the 19th century), although the Catholic Church (and many other religious organizations) had been doing similar work for centuries. In the mid-20th century the UN (and its many aid agencies) became the largest NGO. In the late 20th century the number of NGOs grew explosively. Now there are thousands of them, providing work for hundreds of thousands of people. The NGO elite are well educated people from Western countries that solicit donations, or go off to disaster areas and apply money, equipment, and supplies to alleviate some natural or man-made disaster. Governments have been so impressed by the efficiency of NGOs (compared to government employees) that they have contracted them to perform foreign aid and disaster relief work that was once done by government employees.

Problems, however, have developed. The employees of NGOs, while not highly paid, are infused with a certain degree of idealism. These foreign NGOs bring to disaster areas a bunch of outsiders who have a higher standard of living and different ideas. Several decades ago the main thing these outsiders brought with them was food and medical care. The people on the receiving end were pretty desperate and grateful for the help.

But NGOs have branched out into development and social programs. This has caused unexpected problems with the local leadership. Development programs disrupt the existing economic, and political, relations. The local leaders are often not happy with this, as the NGOs are not always willing to work closely with the existing power structure. While the local worthies may be exploitative, and even corrupt, they are local and they do know more about popular attitudes and ideals than the foreigners. NGOs with social programs (education, especially educating women, new lifestyle choices, and more power for people who don't usually have much) often run into conflict with local leaders. Naturally, the local politicians and traditional leaders have resisted or even fought back. Thus the Afghan government officials calling for all NGOs in the country to be shut down. That included Afghan NGOs, who were doing some of the same work as the foreign ones. The government officials were responding to complaints from numerous old school Afghan tribal and religious leaders who were unhappy with all these foreigners, or urban Afghans with funny ideas, upsetting the ancient ways in the countryside. Moreover, the Afghan government wanted to get the aid money direct, so they could steal more of it.

NGOs are not military organizations but they can fight back. They do this mainly through the media, because they also use favorable media coverage to propel their fund raising efforts. NGOs will also ask, or demand, that the UN or other foreign governments send in peacekeeping troops to protect the NGOs from hostile locals. This had disastrous effects in Somalia during the early 1990s. Some NGOs remained, or came back, to Somalia after the peacekeepers left. These NGOs learned how to cope on their own. They hired local muscle for protection, as well as cutting deals with the local warlords. But eventually the local Islamic radicals became upset at the alien ideas these Western do-gooders brought with them and began to chase all NGOs out.

In eastern Congo aid workers have found themselves the primary target of the local bandits and militias that had created the problems that attracted the foreign aid in the first place. NGOs have learned to raise mini-armies when they must (instead of leaving). But in areas where there are peacekeepers, and the NGOs believe they are not being well served, the NGOs will often simply depart, amid a flurry of press releases, to show their displeasure at the security arrangements or the political goals of the peacekeepers.

But then came Afghanistan and Iraq, two places where many local leaders thought it served their interests best if there were no NGOs at all (except maybe some Islamic ones). Throughout the world NGOs are finding that the world has changed. NGOs will never be the same after what's happened during the last decade.

NGOs have formal legal recognition in many countries and internationally they, as a group, have some standing. NGOs have become a player in international affairs, even though individual NGOs each have their own unique foreign policy. But as a group, they are a power to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, there is no leader of all the NGOs you can negotiate with. Each one has to be dealt with separately. Since NGOs also come from many different countries (although most have staff that speak English), peacekeepers can also run into language and cultural customs problems. NGOs have turned out to be another good idea that, well, got complicated in unexpected ways.

This move from delivering aid to delivering (often unwelcome) ideas has put all NGOs at risk. The NGOs have become players in a worldwide civil war between local traditional ideas and the more transnational concepts that trigger violent reactions in many parts of the world. Now, concerned about doing more harm (or a lot of harm) than good, NGOs are at least talking about how to deal with some of the dangerous conditions their presence creates.