Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can be found
all over the globe today. From private, medical NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders to UN-run NGOs
like UNICEF, non-governmental organizations are an increasingly important part
of the 21st century and aid states in fulfilling tasks such as
feeding people, ensuring that the environment is taken care of, and advocating
for social equality. However, there is a dark side to NGOs. They have been and
are currently being used as tools of foreign policy, specifically with the
United States. Instead of using purely military force, the US has now moved to
using and manipulating NGOs as tools in its foreign policy implementation,
specifically the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and Amnesty
International.
National
Endowment for Democracy
According to its website, the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) is “a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and
strengthening of democratic institutions around the world,” [1] however this is
sweet sounding description is actually quite far from the truth.
The history of the NED begins immediately after the
Reagan administration. Due to the massive revelations concerning the CIA in the
1970s, specifically that they were involved in attempted assassinations of
heads of state, the destabilization of foreign governments, and were illegally
spying on the US citizens, this tarnished the image of the CIA and of the US
government as a whole. While there were many committees that were created
during this time to investigate the CIA, the Church Committee (led by Frank
Church, a Democrat from Idaho) was of critical importance as its findings
“demonstrated the need for perpetual surveillance of the intelligence community
and resulted in the creation of the permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence.” [2] The Select Committee on Intelligence’s purpose was to
oversee federal intelligence activities and while oversight and stability came
in, it seemed to signal that the CIA’s ‘party’ of assassination plots and coups
were over. Yet, this was to continue, but in a new way: under the guise of a
harmful NGO whose purpose was to promote democracy around the world- the
National Endowment for Democracy.
The NED was meant to be a tool of US foreign policy
from its outset. It was the brainchild of Allen Weinstein who, before creating
the Endowment, was a professor at Brown and Georgetown Universities, had served
on the Washington Post’s editorial
staff, and was the Executive Editor of The Washington
Quarterly at Georgetown’s
Center for Strategic and International Studies, a right-wing neoconservative
think tank which would in the future have ties to imperial strategists such as
Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. [3] He stated in a 1991 interview that “A lot of what
we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” [4]
The first director
of the Endowment, Carl Gershman, outright admitted that the Endowment was a
front for the CIA. In 1986 he stated:
We should not have to do this
kind of work covertly. It would be terrible for democratic groups
around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the
‘60s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the
endowment was created. [5] (emphasis added)
It can be further observed that the Endowment is a
tool of the US government as ever since its founding in 1983, it “has received an annual appropriation
approved by the United States Congress as part of the United States Information
Agency budget.” [6]
No sooner than the
Endowment was founded did it begin funding groups that would support US
interests. From 1983 to 1984, the Endowment was active in France and “supported
a ‘trade union-like organization that for professors and students’ to counter
‘left-wing organizations of professors,’” [7] through the funding of seminars,
posters, books, and pamphlets that encouraged opposition to leftist thought. In
the mid and late 1990s, the NED continued its fight against organized labor by
giving in excess of $2.5 million to the American Institute of Free Labor
Development which was a CIA front used to undermine progressive labor unions.
Later on, the Endowment
became involved in interfering with elections in Venezuela and Haiti in order
to undermine leftwing movements there. The NED is and continues to be a source of
instability in nations across the globe that don’t kneel before US imperial
might. Yet the Endowment funds another pseudo-NGO: Freedom House.
Freedom House
Freedom House was
originally founded in 1941 as a pro-democracy and pro-human rights
organization. While this may have been true in the past, in the present day,
Freedom House is quite involved in pushing US interests in global politics and
its leaders have connections to rather unsavory organizations, such as current
Executive Director David Kramer being a Senior Fellow to the Project for the
New American Century, many of whose members are responsible for the current
warmongering status of the US. [8]
During the Bush
administration, the President used Freedom House to support the so-called War on
Terror.
In a March 29, 2006 speech, President Bush stated that Freedom House “declared the year 2005 was one of the most
successful years for freedom since the Freedom House began measuring world
freedom more than 30 years ago” and that the US should not rest “until the promise of liberty reaches every people and every
nation” because “In this new century, the advance of freedom is a vital element
of our strategy to protect the American people, and to secure the peace for
generations to come.” [9]
Later, it was revealed that Freedom House became more and
more supportive of the Bush administration’s policies because of the funding it
was getting from the US government. According to its own internal report in
2007, the US government was providing some 66% of funding for the organization.
[10] This funding mainly came from the US Agency for International Development
(USAID), the US State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Thus, we see not only the political connection of Freedom House to US
government, but major financial connections as well.
It should be noted, however, that Freedom House was not alone
in supporting the government. Under the Bush administration, the US government
forced NGOs to become more compliant to their demands. In 2003, USAID
Administrator Andrew Natsios stated in a speech given at a conference of NGOs
that in Afghanistan the relationship between NGOs and USAID does affect the survival
of the Karzai regime and that Afghans “believe [their life] is improving through mechanisms that
have nothing to do with the U.S. government and nothing to do with the central
government. That is a very serious problem.” [11] On the situation in
Iraq, Natsios stated that when it comes to NGO work in the country “proving
results counts, but showing a connection
between those results and U.S. policy counts as well.” [12]
(emphasis added) NGOs were essentially told that they were tools of the US
government and were being made part of the imperial apparatus.
Most recently, Freedom
House was active in the Arab Spring, where they aided in the training and
financing of civil society groups and individuals “including the April 6 Youth
Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots
activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen.” [13]
While the Endowment
and Freedom House are being used as tools of US foreign policy that does not
mean that the US government isn’t looking for new tools, namely Amnesty
International.
Amnesty International
The human rights organization Amnesty International is the newest tool in the imperial
toolbox of the American Empire. In January 2012, Suzanne Nossel was appointed the
new Executive Director of Amnesty International by the group itself. Before
coming to Amnesty, Nossel already had deep connections to the US government as
she had “served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organizations
at the U.S. Department of State.” [14]
Nossel is known
for coining the term ‘smart power’ which she defined as knowing that “US
interests are furthered
by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals, through alliances, international
institutions, careful diplomacy, and the power of ideals.” [15] While this definition may seem harmless, ‘smart power’
seems to be an enhanced version of Joseph Nye’s ‘soft power,’ which itself is
defined as “the ability to obtain the outcomes one
wants through attraction rather than using the carrots and sticks of payment or
coercion.” [15] A possible example of this ‘smart power’ is the war in
Libya, where the US used the UN as a means to get permission to engage in ‘humanitarian
intervention.’
Yet,
even before Nossel was appointed to Amnesty, the group was unwittingly aiding
in the media war against Syria. In a September 1, 2011 Democracy Now interview, Neil Sammonds, the researcher and one of
the author’s for Amnesty’s report Deadly
Detention: Deaths in Custody Amid Popular Protest in Syria,
spoke about the manner in which the research was done for the report. He stated:
I’ve not been into Syria. Amnesty
International has not been allowed into the country during these events,
although we have requested it. So the
research for this report was done mostly from London, but also from some work
in neighboring countries and through communications with a large network of
contacts and relatives of the families, and, you know, other sources.
[16] (emphasis added)
How can one write a
report with any amount of authority if their only sources are through
second-hand sources that may or may not have a bias or an agenda to push? How can
you write a report using sources whose information has no way of being
verified? It is reminiscent of the media war against Gaddafi, where it was
reported in the mainstream media that he was bombing his own people and had
given Viagra to his soldiers as so they could rape women, but absolutely none
of this was verified.
While NGOs can have a
positive influence on society at large, one must be aware of their backgrounds,
who is in charge of them, and from whom they are getting funding from because
the nature of the NGO is changing, it is being more and more integrated into
the imperial apparatus of domination and exploitation. NGOs are fast becoming
the missionaries of empire.
Endnotes
1: http://www.ned.org/about
2: http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Church_Committee_Created.htm
3: http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/Center_for_Strategic_and_International_Studies#P3782_823232
4: William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, 3rd ed. (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2005) pg 239
5: Ibid, pg 239
6: http://law.justia.com/cfr/title22/22-1.0.1.7.42.html
7: Blum, pg 240
8: http://web.archive.org/web/20110630143054/http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=92&staff=450
9: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0603/29/se.01.html
10: http://web.archive.org/web/20100331104836/http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/71.pdf
11: http://www.usaid.gov/press/speeches/2003/sp030521.html
12: Ibid
13: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html?pagewanted=all
14: http://www.democracyarsenal.org/SmartPowerFA.pdf
15: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-nye/barack-obama-and-soft-pow_b_106717.html
16: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/1/amnesty_international_decries_assad_regimes_brutal
2: http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Church_Committee_Created.htm
3: http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/Center_for_Strategic_and_International_Studies#P3782_823232
4: William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, 3rd ed. (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2005) pg 239
5: Ibid, pg 239
6: http://law.justia.com/cfr/title22/22-1.0.1.7.42.html
7: Blum, pg 240
8: http://web.archive.org/web/20110630143054/http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=92&staff=450
9: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0603/29/se.01.html
10: http://web.archive.org/web/20100331104836/http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/71.pdf
11: http://www.usaid.gov/press/speeches/2003/sp030521.html
12: Ibid
13: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html?pagewanted=all
14: http://www.democracyarsenal.org/SmartPowerFA.pdf
15: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-nye/barack-obama-and-soft-pow_b_106717.html
16: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/1/amnesty_international_decries_assad_regimes_brutal
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