Using NGOs to coerce NATIONS
Sandhya Jain
Non-Western nations have long known that non-governmental
organizations, ostensibly set up to provide humanitarian services to
citizens in their respective countries, such as against Police or other
public authorities, fighting poverty or environmental degradation, are
funded by foreign regimes to serve their agendas. They are in that sense
a tool of coercive diplomacy, or war by other means.
Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu |
Some weeks ago, Egypt, frontrunner of the aborted Arab Spring,
clamped down on foreign NGOs and refused to license eight US civil
groups, including the election-monitoring Carter Centre, prior to the
presidential polls. Under Egyptian law, NGOs cannot operate without
licences.
American NGOs, called quangos, tend to focus on promoting democracy
abroad, an euphemism for electing governments that serve American
interests. Last month, the UAE decided to shut down of the offices of an
American quango run by the Democratic Party but mainly funded by the US
government. Observers said the move was engineered by Riyadh and other
capitals that felt the quango was active in their internal affairs, and
hence urged the UAE to close it.
US foreign policy
Many capitals view quangos as intrusive of national sovereignty. By
grooming ‘democracy activists’ – recall the Coloured Revolutions in
former Soviet republics – they create the environment for US-desired
changes to occur. The decision by UAE and other Gulf countries to
curtail the functioning of German and US foundations is likely to usher
in a new system whereby entities directly or indirectly funded by
foreign governments will be allowed to function only under negotiated
agreements and can no longer operate as they please.
War against Syria
The National Endowment for Democracy, closely associated with the
Reagan administration, was a conceived as a tool of US foreign policy by
its founder Allen Weinstein, a former Professor, Washington Post writer,
and member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a
neoconservative think tank whose membership included Henry Kissinger and
Zbigniew Brzezinski. NED’s first director Carl Gershman was candid that
it was a front for the CIA. From its inception in 1983, NED’s annual
funds are approved by the US Congress as part of the United States
Information Agency budget. Its activities include funding anti-left and
anti-labour movements; meddling in elections in Venezuela and Haiti; and
creating instability in countries resisting Imperial America.
Freedom House, set up in 1941 as a pro-democracy and pro-human rights
organization, is engaged with the Project for the New American Century,
and much of the warmongering in Washington. The Bush administration used
it to support its ‘War on Terror’. The US government provides 66 per
cent of its funding via USAID, the State Department, and the NED.
Freedom House leapt into the Arab Spring, training and financing civil
society groups and individuals, including the April 6 Youth Movement in
Egypt, the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, and grass roots activists in
Yemen.
The Bush administration also compelled NGOs to serve its imperial
agenda. In 2003, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios said the NGO-USAID
link helped the Karzai regime to survive, but Afghans did not appreciate
this. In Iraq, he wanted NGO work there to show a connection with US
policy. It is difficult to be more explicit.
By far the most important tool of empire is Amnesty International.
Its current Executive Director, Suzanne Nossel, was previously Deputy
Assistant Secretary for International Organizations at the US State
Department. She is credited with coining the term ‘smart power’ to
achieve US goals by recruiting others to work for them, as in Libya,
where Washington used the UN to engage in ‘humanitarian intervention.’
Amnesty actively joined the propaganda war against Syria. The author
of a 2011 report on custody deaths in that country confessed in an
interview that Amnesty had not been allowed to enter Syria at the time,
so research for the report was done mainly from London, neighbouring
countries and other sources. In other words, unverified information.
Dubious agendas
In India, despite decades of unhappiness with Western NGOs, the Union
Government decided to openly confront them only when it felt aggrieved
over the stalling of its Rs. 15,000 crore Kudankulam nuclear power
project in Tamil Nadu, and protests over genetically modified crops.
Indian law bans NGOs from taking foreign funds for political purposes or
affecting the security, strategic, scientific or economic interest of
the State. The Church-organised Kudankulam protest was purely political.
Popular concerns over the power of NGOs, however, stem from their
staggering funding, dubious agendas including religious conversion, and
untrammelled powers to interfere in domestic matters. Data available
with the Union Home Ministry, as reported first by The Pioneer, shows
that in the nine years between 2001 and 2010, NGOs received more than Rs
70,000 crores. The highest donors were the US, Germany and Britain, and
the most significant recipients include Gospel For Asia Inc, USA (Rs.
232.71 crore), Fundacion Vicente Ferrer, Barcelona, Spain (Rs.228.60
crore) and World Vision Global Centre, USA (Rs.197.62 crore).
Analysis of the data shows that the greatest sums out of the foreign
contributions were utilized for establishment expenses (Rs. 1482.58
crore), followed by rural development (Rs. 944.30 crore), welfare of
children (Rs. 742.42 crore), construction and maintenance of
school/college (Rs.630.78 crore) and grant of
stipend/scholarship/assistance in cash and kind to poor/deserving
children (Rs. 454.70 crore). Note the diminishing values!
Now, if 50 per cent to 70 per cent of the funds of any organisation
are spent on establishment expenses such as buying land, buildings,
jeeps, office infrastructure, mobiles, laptops, cameras, salaries,
consultancy fees, honorarium, and foreign travel, should such
expenditure be tax-free when there is no public beneficiary?
Huge sums are expended on conversions, which also cannot be
designated as ‘charity’ or ‘public service’. World Vision in particular
has an exclusive Christian identity, as attested to by its own website,
where it admits that while 20 per cent of its worldwide staff belongs to
other faiths, all prospective staff are expected to affirm their
Christian faith in writing! This was after firing some staff in America
for changing their religious affiliations. In the light of these
experiences, many Indians feel that the country does not need foreign
aid to improve the lot of its citizens, and that all social service
activities can be meaningfully conducted with local donations.
As India herself provides considerable assistance to other Asian and
African nations, there is no merit in accepting foreign funding on the
pretext of charity, and then using the same for conversions or politics.
Courtesy: IBTL |