WYY are relief agencies getting a bad press in Europe and a bad name in Africa? The recent interview with John O'Shea of Goal in this newspaper provides some illuminating answers.

Like other relief agencies, Goal has tapped the goodwill and the human and financial resources of the people of Ireland. The Irish people's generosity when confronted with images of human distress in Africa has been heart warming. The response to the famine in my own country, Somalia, was exemplary. But the time has come to take the humanitarian bull by the horns and to ask ourselves: is it a good idea to continue giving money to relief agencies, no questions asked?

FOR a man who claims to shun politics in favour of a purely humanitarian approach, Mr O'Shea has been an intensely partisan and outspoken warrior on Rwanda. His high profile criticisms of the Irish Government's support for the reconstruction of Rwanda have been questionable in the extreme. The quotable quotes grab the headlines; but they are not satisfactory substitutes for sober analysis and sound policies.

Mr O'Shea's underplaying of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis is a political act par excellence. And his references to people rotting in jail can appear like an ill disguised plea for a blanket amnesty for genocide suspects.

The way to achieve justice is to provide the government of Rwanda with constructive criticism and the resources to make prison conditions humane and the justice system functional. That is precisely what the Irish Government has sought to do.

Beyond the ethical issue, the approach favoured by Mr O'Shea is ill advised. The plight of Rwandan refugees in eastern Zaire is very real. This cannot, however, obscure two fundamental facts. Firstly, thousands of these refugees, men and some women, are personally culpable for genocide. Secondly, these same killers - soldiers, militiamen and politicians - are responsible for the political turmoil and the human misery in eastern Zaire.

Having lost the war they provoked when they launched the genocide, they forced these people out of Rwanda in an organised political flight, kept them in exile as a strategy of war, turned the camps into violent bases from which to attack Rwanda, made the local population hostile to the refugees and have used them as human shields in a war they initiated when they began to cleanse the region of Zaireans of Tutsi origin. But NGOs such as Goal, which worked in the camps, focused on the delivery of relief supplies to the exclusion of other critical justice issues.

MR O'Shea's claim that Goal withdrew from Rwanda last autumn because "the needs were not great" highlights the extent to which institutional needs can distort an agency's perception of reality. It is only three years after a genocide that killed more than a million people, left thousands of people handicapped, orphaned, traumatised, homeless, widowed and impoverished; a war that led to a massive exodus, particularly of educated people, and widespread destruction of property; a huge influx of old refugees from the 1960s and the sudden return of hundreds of thousands of those who fled in 1994.

In addition, the country faces the crippling cost of establishing a prison and judicial system to cope with tens of thousands of genocide suspects. If Mr O'Shea believes that Goal has nothing to contribute, one must question its reasons for existence.

From the comfort of Dublin, it is easy to express one's hatred for despotic regimes in the developing world in forthright language. But on the ground, it requires courage to show solidarity with the victims of government injustice.

Mr O'Shea rightly points that Africa is littered with the debris left behind by despots like Idi Amin. It is part of our history; we cannot deny this reality or, in the short term, obliterate its damaging consequences. But our responsibilities to ourselves and to future generations demand that we confront this legacy head on and move on. The continent that gave birth to Idi Amin also produced Nelson Mandela.

John O'Shea would be well advised to remember that before his next outburst.

An important first step towards a better future is public awareness in Africa of what is wrong. The increasingly open debate about the dangers posed by relief NGOs with an emphasis on imposing outside intervention is an encouraging sign.

Rakiya Omaar is codirector of African Rights, a human rights organisation based in London.