Durham, NC - There were too many times when Fiona Terry had to negotiate with violent young men with guns to get food to starving people. There were too many places where war was being fueled by aid money going straight to warlords. And there were too many countries where she saw aid being controlled by host governments for political purposes.

After nearly two decades of traveling the world's crisis spots for groups such as Doctors Without Borders, Terry came to the conclusion that few in humanitarian service are willing to admit: Sometimes humanitarian aid organizations need to walk away from a crisis.

"The bottom line is when the aid you are giving is being turned against the people you're trying to assist, that's when it's time to pull out," Terry said. "That's a guideline you can use in any situation in the world, no matter what the complexities of the particular place and time. You have to ask yourself, ‘Is our aid actually part of the problem?'"

Terry visited Duke this week to deliver the 2008 Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics, sponsored by the Kenan Institute of Ethics.

Author of Condemned to Repeat: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action, the Australian native spent the past 15 years involved in humanitarian relief operations in areas including Northern Iraq, Somalia, the Great Lakes region of Africa, Liberia and along the Sino-Korean border. She is currently based in Sudan, working as an independent researcher on a study for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In an interview on campus this week, Terry said her work in Somalia in 1990-91 was a watershed moment for her and many others. Two hundred or more people were dying a day, many in the streets. Humanitarian organizations rushed in to assist, at first treating it like many other crises. But Somalia was somewhat different, she said.

"Aid was coming in from everywhere, but the only way you could get it to people was by hiring armed groups," Terry said in the interview. "We had two different security groups we worked with. They were from opposing clans, and we tried to have this balance of power. Of course all of this involved payments putting a lot of money in the pockets of warlords.

"After Somalia, we would not work in some places without escort ever again. And that's a problem. The problem is that if you tried to say to them, ‘We don't need your services anymore,' they would say, ‘Oh, yes you do.' They were just in the protection racket. It's a trap. You have to avoid it as much as you could.

"But in Somalia you'd have to weigh all that against the magnitude of the disaster, the number of people who were dying every day. I would say we had no other choice at that time. Even if you were putting money into the pockets of the warlords, it was the only way to get help to people."

However, several years later in North Korea, Terry's branch of Doctors Without Borders did make the controversial decision to walk away despite massive starvation and poverty. The issue there, she said, was that aid organizations stood by while the North Korean government delivered food aid the military and its supporters and withheld it to punish opponents.

"In the late 1990s, North Korean was the largest aid operation in terms of food. But the government food system was one of the main means of oppressing the people. The regime defined people who deserved to live and deserved to die by their social engineering definition. I was so moved by it. I went to the Chinese border and talked to Korean refugees there who had never seen any of the food aid and had to flee to get food.

"And the aid organizations stood by and let the government do this. They allowed the cameras to show starving children, and it was all part of a lie. To me it was a crime, a crime on the level of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s. But when Doctors Without Borders pulled out of North Korea, we were ostracized by other humanitarian organizations."

Aid organizations are changing their attitudes, Terry said. They should start, she said, by dropping utopian ideals of their work and facing up to the compromises they make.

"If you go into a situation with the motto of ‘Do No Harm,' it's not possible. Do No Harm doesn't exist in this world. So the first point is to be aware of it, and I think aid organizations working in Darfur today are thinking about the consequences."

Terry praised Duke University's DukeEngage program, which sends students out to do service projects around the world. But part of that learning, she said, should be on the difficult choices humanitarian service workers have to make.

"The students need exposure to these kinds of issues," Terry said. "The difficulty is young people in new situations can be sponges, just absorbing everything and believing everything they are told. Unfortunately, truth-telling can be a rare commodity, even in humanitarian work. Students need to understand the consequences of aid, even the negative affects of aid, and not let these questions get swept under the rug."