By 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.
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.
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.
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% 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
Center for Human Rights, and
grassroots 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, neighboring countries and other
sources. In other words, unverified information.
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% to 70% 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% 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.
The author is Editor, www.vijayvaani.com
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