Tsunami Relief Plus

Things get extremely complicated very quickly when compassion gets tangled up with other motivations.

In an earlier DoubleQuotes, Tsunami and Tamil Tigers, we saw how the urgent need to get aid to tsunami victims brought Tamil Tigers and Sri Lankan government officials together despite the decades old civil war between them.

Relief work is important in a way that can transcend conflicts, but it can also be used as a weapon. In the two quotes juxtaposed here, we see the US Government intensely suspicious of an NGO providing aid in Tamil areas of Sri Lanka, and a subset of Christian relief workers offering religion along with other forms of aid.

Are these two examples of the ways in which relief work can be subverted to political or religious ends?

Charity Governance, an educational outfit that helps NGOs avoid some of the pitfalls and complexities that surround their work, has suggested in a post about Sri Lanka that the U.S. government might "relax its standards in view of the need to quickly get relief to the people needing aid." Is the US in its concern to avoid financing terrorists putting the lives of Sri Lankan tsunami victims at risk? Is it perhaps foolish, as the saying goes, to look a gift horse in the mouth?

Contrariwise, is the Antioch Community Church, the Texas church described in the second quote as offering religion along with aid, using relief work as a Trojan horse to get into otherwise inaccessible parts of the world to preach the gospel? Rev. Duleep Fernando, a Methodist minister based in Colombo who introduced these particular church members to the camp in question is quoted as saying they "described themselves as humanitarian aid workers," and that "raising religion with traumatized refugees is unethical".

Apparently the Antioch Community Church is the same church two of whose members, Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry, ran afoul of the Taliban for proselytizing Muslims in Afghanistan while doing aid work with Shelter Now…