Poor ‘Are Paying for War on Terror’

Some of the world's poorest people are paying for the "war on terror" as governments cut aid budgets or switch their priorities to address security issues, a leading charity said today.

The Christian Aid report, entitled The Politics of Poverty, said that aid was being politicised as it had been during the cold war. It accused the US of leading the trend.

"We seem to be drifting back to the darkest days of the cold war, to a time when aid was just as liable to prop up dictators and their regimes as it was to build hospitals or drill wells," the report said.

Christian Aid cited the case of Pakistan, which, it said, had become a beneficiary of the fight against terrorism. A pariah state before the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, it soon began receiving large amounts of US and UK aid.

Official development assistance from the UK to Pakistan had fallen to $23.7m (£13.3m) by 2000. However, once the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, became a western ally in the "war on terror", official British aid jumped to almost $70m in 2002, according to official aid figures cited by the study.

Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary - who resigned from the cabinet over Iraq - said the Christian Aid study should serve as a "wake-up call" to the government. "I find it particularly depressing that any of our aid effort should be diverted to fund the occupation of Iraq," he said.

"Regardless of what any of us may think about the invasion of Iraq, we surely can all agree that the poor around the world should not pay for the consequences."

However, the international development minister, Hilary Benn, rejected the accusation that aid was being linked to the fight against terror.

"It isn't true," he told BBC Radio 5 Live's Breakfast show. "This is not an approach which the UK takes. Our aid is given on the basis of need.

"By 2006, 90% of our aid will be spent on the poorest countries of the world, and there it's going to help governments get more children into schools, improve the supply of water, help reduce the number of mums who die in childbirth and the number of kids who die of diseases we know we can prevent."

The report also cited Uganda and Afghanistan to illustrate "the distorting effects" of the fight against terrorism.

Uganda is the third largest recipient of aid from the UK's Department for International Development (DfID), getting £68.5m in 2002-03.

But according to Christian Aid, the Ugandan government's manipulation of the war on terror led to an intensification of conflict between government forces and rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army in the north of the country. A government offensive against the LRA, Operation Iron Fist, has been a disaster for the people of northern Uganda, the charity said.

"In 2002, Uganda had diverted 23% of its social services budget to fund Operation Iron Fist. Given the scale of the UK support, it can be argued that some of this money must have been British aid," the report said.

Christian Aid accused the US-led coalition in Afghanistan of using humanitarian action as a political and military weapon. The charity was particularly critical of the use of provincial reconstruction teams - small groups of soldiers varying in size from between 100 and 300 personnel.

The 19 teams are not only responsible for security, but also for overseeing reconstruction projects, rebuilding infrastructure and supporting the government. The strategy was making the security situation worse for those trying to rebuild the country, Christian Aid argued.

"Coalition troops are blurring the once distinct line between aid worker and combatant by undertaking humanitarian work themselves," the report said.

Daleep Mukarji, Christian Aid's director, called on the prime minister, Tony Blair, to use his forthcoming chairmanship of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations, to stop the "backslide into the mindset of the cold war".

"If the rich world fails in this endeavour, then our future global security will also be undermined," he added.