Word: shawcross
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...William Shawcross...
Despite his commiserative subtitle, The Fate of an Ally, William Shawcross does not allow the reader to forget that Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran, was a pathetic symbol of a corrupt and repressive regime. His fate was to be thrust, ill-suited by temperament or training, into the leadership of a nation whose strategic geography and petroleum resources dictated a major role in the 20th century. Publicly he professed a grand vision, a White Revolution that would modernize his nation. Privately he played the Oriental potentate, surrounded by toadies, pimps and the kitschy trappings of new wealth...
Throughout the years of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, claims Shawcross, most Westerners remained either ignorant or downright skeptical of refugee reports of mass slaughter, but as soon as Viet Nam invaded and permitted a few foreigners to inspect the ghostly nation, the West responded vigorously. The press reported a "holocaust"; Washington increased aid to Kampuchean refugees by a factor of ten (to $69 million); five international relief agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Children's Fund, 60 private volunteer bodies and the interests of 60 governments converged upon the broken land...
...international relief agencies were, much of the time, rendered powerless both by their apolitical status and by the recalcitrance of the regime that Viet Nam had installed. Even their successes, says Shawcross, sometimes proved tragically double-edged. Within two years of the Kampuchean government's 1979 announcement that a famine had pushed more than 2 million people to the brink of starvation, the West poured in more than $600 million worth of supplies. Up to four-fifths of the shipments never reached the hollow-eyed, malarial civilians who needed them most. Some of the rice remained stockpiled in warehouses...
...Shawcross maintains, the entire issue had been eclipsed in the world's short memory by newer and more fashionable tragedies. Though the author takes scrupulous pains to acknowledge the genuine accomplishments of the international agencies, he concludes that throughout one of the largest relief efforts in history nearly all the governments involved "used humanitarianism as a fig leaf for either the poverty or the ruthlessness of their politics." Founded on a basis of meticulous research, his book is, in the end, an elegy to good intentions ill directed and a cry of conscience on behalf...