Agreeable alliteration in this title. Similar to devil and the deep blue sea.

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Despots and dissidents put politics into aid business
Amy Kazmin
Financial Times
23 November 2006

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Burma's wretched jails hold more than 1,100 political prisoners and, for
six years, the International Committee of the Red Cross provided these
opponents of the ruling junta with a measure of comfort bringing doctors,
soap, books and blankets and even repairing the water and sewerage
systems. Confidential talks with inmates also helped the ICRC push
authorities to improve conditions.

But this year the ICRC suspended its programme after the military rulers
headed by General Than Shwe demanded that the foreign representatives
should be accompanied on prison visits by members of government-affiliated
groups an unacceptable breach of confidentiality and Red Cross
international practice.

The obstacles encountered by the Red Cross reflect the problems
confronting other international aid groups as they seek to step up their
work in Burma. It is a dilemma faced in many repressive countries: whether
to follow a regime's instructions and be accused of "subsidising" corrupt
despots, or to resist and risk both the wrath of the regime and the future
of the project. The answer is not obvious anywhere, least of all in Burma.

After years of trying to use the promise of aid as an incentive to push
for democratic change, western governments are de-linking" politics from
aid and are increasingly willing to finance medical, educational and
welfare schemes  for Burma. The country receives just about $3.50 in
annual aid per capita, far less than any other poor country in the region
or many "fragile states" globally.

Yet the military regime's stance towards aid workers has hardened
considerably since the late-2004 purge of General Khin Nyunt, the
pragmatic prime minister who provided aid workers some space, albeit
limited, to do their work.

"The humanitarian community is at a crossroads," says Charles Petrie, the
United Nations Development Programme's resident co-ordinator in Burma.
"The overall political environment is a lot more intense. If we are not
able to get all political groups to understand that the response to acute
suffering goes beyond politics, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to
provide assistance."

While many Burmese technocrats long for greater international
co-operation, those now at the regime's highest echelons view foreign
assistance with intense suspicion. "They view westerners as liberals who
are empowering the masses and [fear] that this will be a backdoor route to
political change," says one UN official.

But even many Burmese dissidents, eager for the junta's demise, have their
own distrust of aid workers albeit for different reasons. In her brief
spells of freedom from house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi Burma's Nobel peace
prize-winning democracy advocate has expressed deep ambivalence towards
aid and scepticism about its ability to improve people's lives without
fundamental change and better governance. Some exiles oppose aid as a
"subsidy" for the regime's weapons spending.

In this way, humanitarian aid to Burma has long been entangled in the
prolonged stand-off between the junta and Ms Suu Kyi, whose National
League for Democracy won a landslide 1990 election victory but was barred
from taking power. As long as Burma was not a mass catastrophe with
millions starving under camera lights, the debate had little sense of
urgency. But over the past four years, Burma's HIV/Aids epidemic persuaded
many western governments they could no longer wait for political change
before responding to the pervasive problems of disease, chronic
malnutrition and poverty.

However, the junta's recent efforts to exert tighter controls over aid
projects which they suspect may be a covert means of undermining their
authority is threatening both existing and new initiatives such as the
$100m fund to combat HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.

Viewed by the junta as "neo-colonials" impinging on Burma's sovereignty,
foreign aid workers have always been subjected to a time-consuming process
securing permission for every trip they make, even to their own project
sites. Access to eastern Burma, where the army has battled ethnic rebels
for decades, is particularly difficult.

Mr Petrie says that a successful US push to put Burma on the agenda of the
UN Security Council, citing the worsening humanitarian situation, has
exacerbated tensions. "It has increased the sense among the senior
leadership that we are nothing more than the extension of the west and the
sanctions policy," he says.

Now, as they move towards a public referendum on a new constitution that
they hope will legitimise the military's "leading role" over society, the
generals have been pushing international agencies to work through
junta-affiliated organisations, such as the Union Solidarity and
Development Association. Ostensibly an independent social welfare
organisation, the USDA is headed by a general and is expected to emerge as
a pro-military political party in future elections.

Such obstacles have put aid efforts in jeopardy. Medicins Sans Frontieres
of France this year pulled out of a malaria project in eastern Burma,
citing access difficulties to the conflict zone for its foreign staff.
During October floods in the north, a Red Cross offer of help was met with
demands to channel the relief through junta-affiliated groups, in effect
thwarting the assistance.

Recently, the junta cancelled a $9m internationally-backed campaign to
vaccinate around 13m children under the age of 10 against measles which
Unicef says kills some 1,200 Burmese children annually. In scaling back
the immunisation programme to only those under two years old, the regime
cited concerns that some children could suffer adverse reactions to the
vaccines and that such cases would be used as anti-regime propaganda.

Amid these developments, the UN is now desperate to persuade sceptical
Burmese leaders and wary pro-democracy activists that foreign aid is both
genuinely needed and available but will be delivered only through
non-partisan entities. Ibrahim Gambari, the UN under-secretary general,
delivered that message on a visit to Burma this month.

"It is a question of telling them to back off and getting the senior
leadership and other political groups both inside and outside the country
to understand that they have to work with us," Mr Petrie says.

Whether or not Mr Gambari has succeeded in convincing the generals will be
crucial for the future prospects of the new "Three Diseases Fund"
established by the UK, European Commission, Australia, Sweden, the
Netherlands and Norway, and a $43m educational initiative being planned by
Unicef with the EU, UK, Norway and Denmark.

Even then, however, the battle to get aid through to Burma will go on.
Says Mr Petrie: "There is an imperative to address certain aspects of
human suffering and that imperative is different from the effort to
promote political change."