Who is my neighbour? The Bible says that Christ responded to the question with the parable of the good Samaritan. Whether people contribute to the work of aid agencies from a Christian or secular humanitarian motive, this depiction of someone who acts immediately and without qualification to relieve the urgent physical suffering of another person is a powerful one.
However, in today's world the reality of the conditions in which we operate is more complex. What should the good Samaritan do if he travels the same route everyday for several years and finds another victim of the muggers each week at the roadside?
Treat each victim with the same kindness?
Give up his acts of compassion on the grounds that his purse will not bear the demands?
Or begin to ask what is wrong with this particular road or the society through which it passes?
Dilemmas of this nature, affecting human rights, arise every day in many of the countries in which Concern works.
The Rwandan genocide, for example, caused huge trauma within the aid community. The slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians was bad enough; then there was the barrage of criticism levelled against the agencies for providing food, shelter and medicine to the million or so refugees who subsequently fled into Zaire.
It was strongly contended by organisations such as African Rights that the agencies were feeding the killers and allowing them to maintain their organisational structure over the Hutu civilians within the camps.
The charge is not without foundation. But what were the agencies to do?
Nearly 25,000 people died of cholera in the camps at Goma. How could humanitarians leave these people to their fate without trying to help?
And what about children and those in the refugee population who were completely innocent?
Brutality and human rights abuses were never the monopoly of any one side in Central Africa. In the war conducted by Rwanda and Uganda to depose Mobutu in Zaire, Laurent Kabila's forces summarily executed many thousands of Hutus suspected of complicity in the genocide.
Then there was also the culture of denial. I recall being involved in a very heated argument with the US Deputy Ambassador in Kigali in July 1997. I had been to visit Concern's operations at Kisingani in the Congo and had been told by our people of how they had been stopped from servicing a refugee camp of 50,000 nearby. When allowed to return some days later all traces of the camp and the refugees had been obliterated.
The presumption was that they had been killed by Kabilla's forces. The Deputy Ambassador refused to accept this evidence and accused me of trying to justify our continued presence in the area.
The dilemma continues in Rwanda today. Over 120,000 people suspected of genocide are in prison awaiting trial. It will take years to process these cases. The prisoners are held in very bad conditions in 60 prisons and cachots (local jails). Concern feeds these prisoners in 12 communes throughout the country.
Here we confront a double dilemma. Many of the prisoners are probably guilty of horrendous crimes. We are also arguably supporting a justice system which is abusing the human rights of prisoners. We have to take the view that these prisoners are human beings, be they guilty or innocent, and if we do not feed them the burden on their families to do so will be too great.
The picture is similar in many other parts of the world. We see extra-judicial killings, abuse of refugees by host governments, suppression of political opposition and corrupt and inadequate judicial systems.
The consequences of confronting these abuses are potentially serious. We risk our operations being closed down and our expatriate staff being expelled. For our national staff the consequences may be even worse.
Without human rights there cannot be a functioning civil society and so human rights considerations must inform everything we do.
The fact that there are difficulties does not mean we can say that the position is hopeless and we must concentrate on a simple humanitarian agenda. The position is not hopeless.
The fostering of strong human rights culture by the governments of South Africa, Botswana, Malawi and Namibia show how wrong it is to condemn the rest of the developing world to lesser expectations.
It is unpleasant and uncomfortable to have to compromise with evil. It causes much soul searching and no little internal disposition. The question always is to find the way of doing the most for ordinary people.