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Why
they hate our kind hearts, too
Joan
Roelofs
May 14, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/roelofs05132006.html
In
recent years, nations have challenged the activities and very existence
of non-governmental organizations. Russia, Zimbabwe, and Eritrea
have enacted new measures requiring registration; "Open Society
Institute" affiliates have been shut down in Eastern Europe; and
Venezuela has charged the Súmate NGO leaders with treason.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, staff of Western charitable NGOs (CARE
and Doctors Without Borders) have been assassinated.
What
are these organizations, and who or what is behind them?
They
are heirs of the missionaries, who did many good deeds, bringing
sewing machines to Bulgaria, ideas of women's liberation to Chinese
footbinders, and life-saving medicines to the less industrialized
world. Yet the missionaries also served as scouts for corporations
and colonizers, tying knots with the most ambitious local people,
especially those adept at bilingualism.
Missionaries
are still operating today, but the field has become more intensely
populated and diverse. Today's NGOs are elephantine, serpentine,
and Byzantine. They may be international organizations, their local
affiliates, or seemingly spontaneous grassroots groups.
Most
funding and direction come from the wealthy nations. Often the donors
form a conglomerate creating mutual responsibility and considerable
ambiguity. CIVICUS, a partnership to promote "civil society" worldwide,
is funded by, among others, American Express Foundation, Bristol-Myers
Squibb Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Canadian International
Development Agency, Ford Foundation, Harvard University, Oxfam,
and United Nations Development Programme.
If
the source is confusing, the message is usually clear: "democratization"
strives for civil rights and elections, but it also must include
an open door to foreign capital, labor contracts, resource extraction,
and military training. These networks also define "civil society"
to include rock concerts and street mobs, but not government-provided
maternal health clinics, child care, or senior services.
Affluent
nations' government agencies are important NGO funders. The most
notorious is the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED; ostensibly
a nongovernmental foundation), created by Congress in 1983 to do
openly what had been CIA cold war covert activities. When these
operations were revealed in 1967, there was shock, not so much because
the US was covertly funding foreign political and labor groups,
but because organizations such as the National Education Association,
American Newspaper Guild, American Federation of State, County,
and Municipal Employees, and the National Student Association were
secretly used as pass-throughs, and all but the top officers were
unwitting. Actual and phony foundations also distributed CIA funds.
NED
changed this-but not very much. It distributes grants both directly
and through other organizations, now overtly. Its "core grantees"
are the Center for International Private Enterprise (of the US Chamber
of Commerce), the American Center for International Labor Solidarity
(of the AFL-CIO), and, affiliated with the parties, the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International
Republican Institute. Some private foundations chip in, for example,
Smith Richardson and Mellon-Scaife. The Mott Foundation gave the
NDI $150,000 in 1998 "to increase public confidence in democratization
and the transition to a market economy in Ukraine." Foundations
also directly co-fund NED's ultimate grantees. Thus, the Lilly Endowment
supports the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, headed
by Hernando de Soto, which offers free-market remedies for poverty.
Other
capitalist democracies now have government foundations similar to
NED, and they work collaboratively, e.g., the Canadian Rights and
Democracy and the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy.
Additional US agencies have joined NED and the CIA in this work,
notably, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and United
States Information Agency (USIA), which support and create foreign
NGOs and media.
Germany,
France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, and Sweden fund their political
parties' foundations. The European members of the Socialist International's
fund, the European Forum for Democracy and Solidarity, distributes
"democratization" aid.
The
European Union has worldwide grant programs for sustainable development
and democratization. NATO grant programs support environmental organizations,
among others. United Nations agencies such as UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO,
UNDP, and FAO have long operated this way, and the World Bank funds,
sponsors, guides, and coordinates grassroots poor people's organizations.
NGOs
in prosperous nations have extensive grant programs overseas. These
include not only the obviously international ones, e.g., Rotary,
American Friends Service Committee, and Oxfam; but also labor organizations
such as the American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation.
Corporate foundations are active throughout the world, and sometimes
have separate funds directed by employees, for example, the Boeing
Employees Fund, which supports charities in Japan and England.
Why
would these philanthropic efforts offend anyone? Why do they hate
our kind hearts?
In
the first place, these public-private philanthropies have worked
together to fund and direct overthrow movements. We had a "Subversive
Activities Control Board" here, but export was encouraged. The grantees'
activities included destabilization, the creation of mobs preventing
elected governments from ruling, chaos, and violence. Among those
funded were the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity in Poland,
Union of Democratic Forces in Bulgaria, Otpor in Serbia, and, more
recently, similar groups in the succession states of the USSR. Sometimes
mobs (especially of young people) have been moved around from one
country to another to give the impression of vast popular opposition.
The NED, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Soros philanthropies
have been particularly active in these operations. Human Rights
Watch (formerly Helsinki Watch) has nurtured opposition groups.
Reformers seeking social democracy or democratic socialism were
excluded; such systems might oppress the "vulture capitalists."
It
is hard to know how much native support existed for the Western-funded
revolutions, as media and information (especially if we can't read
Mongolian, Bulgarian, or Uzbeki) are produced by the same conglomerates.
Of course, all revolutions are made by minorities, often with assistance
of foreign allies. However, by today's standards as embodied in
the UN Charter, subverting with the intention of overthrowing foreign
governments is a grave violation of international law. Many were
shocked by the NED activities complementing other instruments of
intervention that helped to destroy the Sandinista revolution in
Nicaragua. Yet the 1990 election was judged by the NGO observers
to be a free one; neither threats of physical annihilation nor millions
of foreign dollars violated the purity of that process. "Cold-war
liberal" policymakers have advocated covert actions as a peaceful
alternative to invasion, but it isn't as if military action has
faded away; they work together.
Such
attempts are ongoing. The Venezuelan indictment is just one indication
of a larger NED-NGO operation. Plans for annihilating the Cuban
revolution, via "independent libraries," "Red Feminista Cubana,"
and other created organizations, are clearly spelled out on the
NED web site.
NGOs
are also used to disrupt revolutionary or even reformist movements
that might interfere with neo-liberal goals, hampering the ability
of corporations to go anywhere and do anything. Thus, as James Petras
has reported, radical social groups and their leaders are co-opted
into NGOs dedicated to worthy, ameliorative projects that are no
threat to Western interests. Instead of broad movements challenging
systemic causes of oppression, activists are recruited into discrete,
well-funded "identity" politics and single-issue organizations,
and poverty is just another minority status.
In
India and South Africa, the very poor have been organized into Slum
Dwellers and Shack Dwellers Associations, which meet with the World
Bank people to discuss what is to be done. Protesters against the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were channeled into groups
that were invited and funded to attend the meetings preparing this
treaty. Those concerned with the devastation of oil, lumber, and
mineral extraction throughout the world can utilize the "participatory
mechanisms" of the Earth Council, one of whose board members is
Klaus Schwab, director of the World Economic Forum. Conferences
for the protesters "parallel" to the globalization elite's are supported
by that same elite. These do create fruitful interaction among dissidents;
yet they may also function as a diversionary tactic. We won't know
unless these possibilities are investigated.
Amelioration
is important to keep those societies newly "marketized" on a steady
course despite crushing poverty. In Mongolia (as elsewhere), "shock
therapy," decimating both employment and social services, has resulted
in street children, child prostitution, and increasing maternal
mortality, none of which occurred in its "undeveloped" or communist
phases. However, the rock concerts and street mobs have attained
freedom. Enter PACT (originally, Private Agencies Collaborating
Together; funders now include the Ford Foundation, US AID, Mercy
Corps International, the Nature Conservancy, the World Bank, Citigroup,
Chevron, Levi Strauss, and Microsoft), which provides some substitutes
for the former socialist institutions, while desperation drives
Mongolia's leaders to welcome foreign garment industries and copper
and gold extraction.
For
many nations far from the North Atlantic, NATO seems to promise
economic security. This inclination has been abetted by the creation,
through NATO's grant programs, of NGOs to foster the NATO spirit,
and in Bulgaria, a charitable NGO to provide employment for their
former military officers, who wouldn't fit in. NATO also supplies
research funds for universities in Eastern Europe, which now have
little government funding, and is attempting to expand its charities
throughout North Africa and the Middle East.
Prominent
insiders, who sit high in the democracy-promotion turrets of the
foundation-NGO international world, have problems with the system,
although they may ignore or applaud the overthrow operations. What
concerns them is the feudal relationship existing between the wealthy
Western institutional patrons and the clients in poorer lands, and
the NGOs lack of a genuine local constituency. Thomas Carothers,
of the Carnegie Endowment, has written: "Transnational civil society
is . . . very much part of the same projection of Western political
and economic power that civil society activists decry in other venues."
Others
are concerned about the "brain drain" drawing the scarce educated
people away from government service or authentic grassroots organizations,
neither of which can offer comparable pay or perks. They protest
the imposition of a foreign culture that denigrates indigenous knowledge,
and paradoxically, programs such as microcredit in South Asia that
reinforce the more oppressive patriarchical aspects of traditional
cultures.
NGO
staff members have been accused of being spies. Whether or not this
is the case, the system allows access to remote native cultures,
where the lay of the land and sociograms of local influentials can
be charted for any purpose. This type of missionary penetration,
attained through Bible translation in the Amazon River basin, has
been recounted in Thy Will Be Done, by Colby and Dennett.
NGOs
are now extensively occupied in the relief of disasters, whether
natural or man-made, and the US military (with its "coalition")
is deeply involved in both the comforting and the afflicting. To
receive US funds, humanitarian organizations must support US foreign
policy. Consequently, some, such as Oxfam UK, have withdrawn their
workers from Iraq. Those remaining are often regarded as collaborators,
which is not surprising, as many international NGOs have been handmaids
to subversion, overthrow, and occupation. Some have even supported
"humanitarian" bombing, especially in the case of Yugoslavia.
It
is hard to assess accurately NGOs' complicity because there are
few incentives for critical studies by journalists or academics,
and anti-capitalist activists are often knotted up in some way.
Information about NGOs mostly comes from the same funding sources,
such as "Transitions on Line" of the Soros enterprises, or OneWorld.net,
sponsored by the Ford Foundation and others. A networking resource,
Ngo.net, is administered by Freedom House and funded by the USAID.
The
peak of international NGOs, the World Social Forum, meets at the
same time as the World Economic Forum, only far away. The WSF's
general funding is rarely scrutinized by the participants, whose
travel expenses come from similar sources. An exception is a report
by the Research Unit on Political Economy-India, which explains
why foundation funding was refused for the 2004 WSF in Mumbai, and
discusses critically the activities of the Ford Foundation in India.
It
is news when any NGO nibbles at the hand that feeds it, as did a
Pakistani theater group last November. Invited to a women's theater
festival in India, they were sent home because the organizers deemed
their contribution too anti-US for a Ford Foundation-sponsored event.
As
all generalizations have exceptions, let it be noted that some NGOs
are impeccable, and even peccable ones often have humanitarian staff
and directors. A recent attempt by dissidents seeking international
donors to "democracy promotion" in the US, the International Endowment
for Democracy, could give an effective jolt. Yet it may be that
democracy, justice, or equality are not readily attainable by such
means. For several centuries NGOs have been providing "disaster
aid" for societies being "marketized." What can we learn from this
history?
*Joan
Roelofs is a professor emerita of political science in Keene, NH.
More information on this subject may be found in her Foundations
and Public Policy: the Mask of Pluralism. Other books are Greening
Cities: Building Just and Sustainable Communities, and a just-published
translation of Victor Considerant's Principes du socialisme: Manifeste
de la démocratie au XIX siècle. Email: joan.roelofs@verizon.net
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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