From the NY Times

IN this season of generosity, of morality plays about Scrooge and the Grinch and the global imperative to help those who are less fortunate, think a moment about this question: what if your gift could relieve Tiny Tim's misery for now, but risked perpetuating it - or even worsening it - in the long run?

This is no theoretical exercise, and there is no easy answer. Just this sort of dilemma is unfolding right now worldwide, in places like Zimbabwe.

In Zimbabwe, more than a third of the 12 million population need donated food to avoid malnutrition, or worse. More than 700,000 urban Zimbabweans lost their homes this year as well.

The United Nations and nonprofit charities with global reach are, as always, rushing to help. The World Food Program will distribute 331,000 metric tons of corn and other staples in Zimbabwe by 2007, nearly a third of all the donations it plans for southern Africa. The United Nations is building 2,500 shelters in Harare, the capital, to house the homeless.

Such generosity is welcome, but its subtext raises wrenching ethical issues. For in the view of critics, these humanitarian gestures will not simply save lives and ease misery, though they will surely do that. The critics say that the aid also will bolster Zimbabwe's authoritarian regime, which razed and burned the homes of those 700,000 citizens earlier this year, and commanded them to move into the countryside.

President Robert G. Mugabe calls the demolitions slum clearance. Critics call them a plot to disperse the same impoverished Zimbabweans who pose the greatest threat to Mr. Mugabe's 25-year rule.

Most United Nations food aid is being funneled, at Zimbabwe's insistence, into rural areas. While that need is great, the effect is to deny aid to those poor who have lost their homes but who resisted being relocated to rural areas. Zimbabwe's rulers have also refused to let the United Nations erect tents or other temporary shelters that might make it easier for those whose homes were razed to remain in the cities.

The world's aid to Zimbabweans is part of a devil's bargain, critics say: save the poor from hunger and exposure, but at the price of aiding the very rulers who are making them hungry and exposed in the first place.

Should such deals be struck? Implicitly and otherwise, they are struck all the time: In Darfur, relief organizations might be said to have aided the Sudanese government's ethnic cleansing merely by providing assistance to refugee camps set up by the victims of that cleansing. While refugees are fed and housed far away from their homes, the government can consolidate its hold on their former territory.

North Korea demanded this month that international food donors leave the country by year's end, ratcheting up its leaders' efforts to stop outsiders from monitoring the delivery of food to its starving citizens. In Bosnia, Rwanda and dozens of other crises, humanitarian agencies have been faced with the prospect that their good deeds could redound to the benefit of those who created the human suffering they sought to address.

Such moral dilemmas hardly overshadow the life-saving work that relief agencies perform. But the dilemmas are not trivial. Since the cold war ended, humanitarian responses to wars and political crises have mushroomed, sometimes supplanting more muscular diplomatic and military actions of years past. Sending aid, it seems, is easier, warmer and fuzzier than tackling the root problems that led to the crisis at hand.

As relief has become a preferred response to problems like refugee crises, dictators and warlords have become ever cannier at exploiting that aid. And the dilemmas have become more common and thornier. "It's one of the conundrums that humanitarian organizations face," Larry Minear, the director of the Humanitarianism and War Project at Tufts University, said in a telephone interview. Such tradeoffs, he said, have provoked debate over whether there are times when "one should withhold assistance in the interest of whatever overall objective there might be - including an end to the particular conflict that might be creating the need."

Rarely, agencies do withhold assistance. After the Rwanda genocide of the mid-1990's, the International Rescue Committee pulled its workers out of refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo after concluding that soldiers behind the genocide were using the camps to regroup for further attacks.

"We just decided we would not be complicit," George Rupp, the organization's current president, said in a telephone interview. But, he acknowledged: "That was a very complicated decision, one that continues to reverberate around the I.R.C. The result was that there were people with real needs that were not met."

In almost every case, agencies swallow hard and offer help anyway, arguing that the greater good of saving lives and reducing suffering outweighs the ignominy of being a handmaiden to oppression. The real question, perhaps, is how that ignominy might be held to a minimum.

One option, experts say, is for relief agencies to publicize their devil's bargains - to show the world how such blackmail works, and potentially to shame those responsible for it. Another is to press wrongdoers, publicly and in private, to stop rights abuses that humanitarians can document. Relief agencies have historically been loath to do that for fear that angry governments will bar them from helping victims of the abuses.

A theologian in Geneva, Hugo Slim, believes that this fear is overrated; even evil rulers, he says, are usually reluctant to do much more than hector those who bring aid. Mr. Slim, the chief scholar at the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, said in an interview that relief agencies can be creative in expressing themselves, perhaps by persuading moral authorities further removed from the crisis to speak for them.

In Zimbabwe, for example, the World Food Program and the United Nations Development Program have said little about the constraints imposed on them. But top United Nations humanitarian and housing envoys have been scathingly critical of Mr. Mugabe's slum-demolition program and have demanded that relief agencies be given wider leeway to aid its victims.

Humanitarian organizations can also be subversive. Even if they are sharply limited in their own efforts, relief workers can strike quiet alliances with local activists, leverage their influence with sympathetic government insiders and educate those they are helping about their rights.

If all else fails, Mr. Slim, Mr. Minear and others agree, the last resort - halting aid and withdrawing - remains. Even then, Mr. Slim said, it is vital to explain the decision to the needy and seek their "informed consent." Such efforts shield aid agencies from charges of desertion, and preserve the bond between benefactor and recipient that is at the heart of humanitarian efforts.

All those are long-term strategies. But they hold the prospect of reducing the humanitarian world's complicity in long-term problems.

It's a pickle alright!

I'm not sure I disagree with the move to rid Harare of the slums. Notwithstanding Mugabe's motives, there is little point in turning Harare into a vast wasteland of tin sheds. This is especially true in a country whose climate makes it relatively easy to provide for oneself through subsistance farming.

The fact that hunters can come and go in relative safety is, to me, a testament that things aren't that bad. As a matter of fact, the folks at the airport this year were the friendliest and most helpful that I have ever experienced.

At the moment the slide to self-destruction seems to be going on at a higher rate in South Africa and Namibia, though Zim has beaten them to the punch as to seizing land.

It is not terribly different than the Ethiopian recurring periods of starvation. Organizations can keep feeding the masses but then the mass just keeps on increasing in size, until eventually the masses equal the food and water supplies.

And I yet to see anyone starving in Zim, or the US for that matter.

Who knows what the future may bring, but God bless Zimbabwe, for as long as it possible anyway.

One thing for sure is that whatever they are doing now is not working. I dont believe that they can be helped as log as the present government is in charge. South Africa is heading for the toilet faster than I ever expected and now with the grumbling in Namibia is worsening. My theory is hunt while you can and let them kill themselves if they feel the need to do so. Lets just not provide them with the guns to do so as we have so often in the past.

The name of this topic is right on. It is what the Devil is doing. This is a discussion that will take sometime to work out and be closed.

Are the efforts of those agencies around the world who try to help just a band-aid for those in need? The press and others will tell you it is for their good, is it?

But for hunting and what it brings to Africa is much needed revenue for some. But eventually all countries will go the way of those before them because of inept leadership and misguided decision making. What seems right too those in power is not. They all seem to want everyone to be OKAY. Thats not the way it is and this will be the demise of hunting in Africa. And maybe very soon.

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Does the white man deserve the opportunities?

What makes him so special?

JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 24 - Sending what some call an ominous signal to this nation's leaders, South Africa's sprawling shantytowns have begun to erupt, sometimes violently, in protest over the government's inability to deliver the better life that the end of apartheid seemed to herald a dozen years ago.

South Africa’s Poor Protest At a hillside shantytown in Durban called Foreman Road, riot police officers fired rubber bullets in mid-November to disperse 2,000 residents marching to the municipal mayor's office downtown. Two protesters were injured; 45 were arrested. The rest burned an effigy of the city's mayor, Obed Mlaba.

Their grievance was unadorned: since Foreman Road's 1,000 shacks sprang up nearly two decades ago, the only measurable improvements to the residents' lives amounted to a single water standpipe and four scrap-wood privies. Electricity and real toilets were a pipe dream. Promises of new homes, they said, were ephemeral.

"This is the worst area in the country," said one resident, a middle-aged man who identified himself only as Senior. "We don't so much need water or electricity. We need land and housing. They need to find us land and build us new homes."

In Pretoria that week, 500 shantytown residents looted and burned a city council member's home and car to protest limited access to government housing. Two weeks earlier, protesters burned municipal offices in Promosa after being evicted from their illegal shanties. In late September, Botleng Township residents rioted after a sewage-fouled water supply caused 600 cases of typhoid and perhaps 20 deaths.

And just Thursday, Cape Town officials warned residents of a vast shantytown near the city airport that they faced arrest if they tried to squat in an unfinished housing project nearby.

South Africa's safety and security minister said in October that 881 protests rocked slums in the preceding year; unofficial tallies say that at least 50 were violent. Statistics for previous years were not kept, but one analyst, David Hemson of the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, estimated that the minister's tally was at least five times the number of any comparable previous period.

"I think it's one of the most important developments in the postliberation period," said Mr. Hemson, who leads a project on urban and rural development for the council. "It shows that ordinary people are now feeling that they can only get ahead by coming out on the streets and mobilizing - and those are the poorest people in society. That's a sea change from the position in, say, 1994, when everyone was expecting great changes from above."

In fact, the government has made great changes. Since 1994, South Africa's government has built and largely given away 1.8 million basic houses, usually 16 feet by 20 feet, often to former shantytown dwellers. More than 10 million have gained access to clean water, and countless others have been connected to electrical lines or basic sanitation facilities.

Yet at the same time, researchers say, rising poverty has caused 2 million to lose their homes and 10 million more to have their water or power cut off because of unpaid bills. And the number of shanty dwellers has grown by as much as 50 percent, to 12.5 million people - more than one in four South Africans, many living in a level of squalor that would render most observers from the developed world speechless.

For South African blacks, the current plight is uncomfortably close to the one they endured under apartheid. Black shantytowns first rose under white rule, the result of policies intended to keep nonwhites impoverished and powerless. During apartheid, from the 1940's to the 1980's, officials uprooted and moved millions of blacks, consigning many to transit camps that became permanent shantytowns, sending others to black townships that quickly attracted masses of squatters.

Privation led millions more blacks to migrate to the cities, setting up vast squatter camps on the outskirts of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and other cities.