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http://frontierpost.com.pk/articles.asp?id=3&date1=3/28/2002 The Frontier Post (Pakistan) March 28, 2002 NGOS’ war against national sovereignty-II Dr Naseer Dashti -NGOs at this point were finding themselves working in, manipulating, subverting and attempting to influence formal development systems in third world countries. -The prime aim of this generosity was to control political and social systems and ensure unhindered supply of raw material sources from those countries. -A majority of the nationalist analysts are concerned at the grave implications of the unrestricted activities of these organisations. They believe that NGOs always follow the guidance of donor agencies or countries and function as lookout institutions for them. -The NGOs are working for transnational corporations in order to cultivate political influence and economic interests in target countries. These corporations and multinationals have formed a number of proxies in the form of “non-profit” organisations - known variously as “coordination centres” or “distribution centres”. NGOs are frequently confused with grassroots organisations. What exactly are grassroots organisations has no definite meaning. The more practical way to define a GRO is the word itself, the roots, i.e. local organisations. The term local can be defined simply as meaning “of or affecting a particular place or small area”. Grassroots organisations are distinguished from national or regional organisations, which are relatively remote from the people who are supposed to be involved in and benefited by development. GROs have more social content and function. They are associated with “bottom-up” development rather than with the “top-down” style of decision making and implementation that is undertaken at national or regional levels. Some examples can be cooperatives, unions and, sometimes, producers’ associations. By the 1990s, in the changed international situation the focus of NGOs was on facilitating sustainable changes in these settings on a regional or even national basis. This meant less direct involvement at village level for these particular NGOs, and more involvement with a variety of public and private organisations that control financial resources and policy priorities related to development. NGOs at this point were finding themselves working in, manipulating, subverting and attempting to influence formal development systems in third world countries. As a result of this strategic change both of approach and strategy for NGOs by their sponsors, whether individual, institutional or governmental, the international NGOs become intermediaries between the donors and targeted countries. Major non-governmental international organisations started initiating and supporting NGOs and GROs in targeted countries in their grassroots work through funding, technical advice and advocacy for achieving overall political and economic objectives. The NGOs have assigned some noble goals for them to achieve. They are supposed to be the connective tissue of a democratic culture, and have the potential for creating a deep rooted network of organisations and institutions that mediate between the citizen and the state. They were supposed to provide means for expressing and actively addressing varied and complex needs of society by motivating individuals to act independently, creating an alternative to the centralized state with greater flexibility and independence. They assigned to them the promotion of pluralism and diversity in society, such as protecting and strengthening cultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic and other identities. The rising popularity of socialism and its theoretical charm for third world countries compel the Western bloc to try other means. When they saw that newly independent states are slipping away from their control and that democratic pluralism in those countries is not gaining ground as anticipated benefits to civil society, they started looking for alternate partners. These alternate partners came in the shape of non-governmental organisations. Suddenly they became very ‘generous’ in giving aid to their former subjugated peoples in the form of structural adjustment loans, charity, and technical support. Most aid was siphoned to these countries through these NGOs. The prime aim of this generosity was to control political and social systems and ensure unhindered supply of raw material sources from those countries. NGOs had a political agenda coated in the following fine-to-be read motives, that is: to support development innovation at all levels - local, national, global - in order to contribute to the search for solutions to the problems of poverty, injustice, gender inequity and religious extremism; to promote sharing of knowledge, mutual dialogue, understanding and cooperation for social and economic development. In this context, the role of NGOs was to act as a bridge between diverse constituencies in the social, academic, financial and political sectors, and multilateral institutions. NGOs were painted as a global catalyst aiming to mobilize and strengthen civil society by actively building partnerships among them and with other sectors, act as prominent knowledge brokers supporting the generation of knowledge on innovative development initiatives, concepts and practices, and stimulate exchanges and dissemination at all levels and across sectors. Contrary to the tall claims about the noble goals of NGOs, the nature of “non-governmental organisations” has created serious doubts from the very day when these NGOs started assuming a multi-dimensional role. Many of the points concerning the relationship between governmental and non-governmental organisations, the actual agenda of these organisations, mysteries regarding their functioning and finances have been made many times over. A majority of the nationalist analysts are concerned at the grave implications of the unrestricted activities of these organisations. They believe that NGOs always follow the guidance of donor agencies or countries and function as lookout institutions for them. These NGOs warn of problems emanating in poor countries that might cause adverse effects on the national interests of donor countries and their multinational corporations. The donor countries do not give money out of love and humanity. They put conditionalities for using the amount of aid from them. They convince the recipient countries that their choice of NGOs was prompted by rampant corruption and bureaucratic apathy towards democratic ideals. Therefore, they route their ‘humanitarian aid’ through their proxies, NGOs. The inevitable effect of such a policy has been to reduce the opportunities for local accountability, involvement and their proper utilization and value. Donor agencies maintain that development funds with autonomy for their utilization serves as an intermediary between the donors on the one hand, and the operative recipients on the other, thereby promoting greater local responsibility and accountability. They assert that by means of equation or aggregate funding of donor finances into sectoral funding mechanisms, administrative burdens are reduced on both the donor and recipient sides. NGOs claim to have narrower relationships to state organisms, but the reality is totally reverse to this voluntary image of these organisations because of their financing sources which are fundamentally governmental and institutional. According to a UN document, the public fund share in financing of NGOs has reached 40 percent in the United Kingdom and can climb up to 80 percent, as is the case in Italy, in Sweden or in Norway. A growing share of assistance from Western countries is channeled through NGOs. In 1988 it represented 35 percent of NGOs’ income, against 1.5 percent in 1970. In developing countries, the number of NGOs participating in development activities has shown a spectacular increase during the last 10 years. The World Bank estimates that NGOs registered in India process a quarter of entire external assistance, that is to say 520 million dollars per year. A UN figure shows that NGOs have had an increasingly large access to Aid For Development (AFD) budgets in the course of 10 or 15 years, because the execution of programmes centered on emergency works, on reduction of poverty, or on issues such as ethnic and social integration have been increasingly confided to them. The UN report further says that as an average 9 to 10 percent of the totality of the AFD is allocated to programmes managed by non-governmental organisations, which have assumed far more importance than that forwarded by the United Nations system. Before the UN “social summit” in 1995, the World Bank has already noted that by 1995, 5.5 billion dollars were forwarded to NGOs. In 1992 alone, the EEC opened 37 “credit lines” for activity of NGOs, for an amount of approximately 5 billion francs excluding “credit lines” opened by governments and their specialized ministries and other international institutions. The bond between NGOs and various sponsoring governments has taken to other forms and extent. The World Bank has informed that during 1995, 41 percent of the projects approved by the bank anticipated a participation of NGOs. The donor agencies are therefore asserting a prerequisite of participation of NGOs at a more precocious stage in the cycle of the project, especially for evaluation of environmental and social impacts of the activities financed by the bank and a stronger participation of NGOs to sectoral and economic studies. Participation level has reached 57 percent for World Bank projects in Africa and 67 percent in those of South Asia. The NGOs are working for transnational corporations in order to cultivate political influence and economic interests in target countries. These corporations and multinationals have formed a number of proxies in the form of “non-profit” organisations - known variously as “coordination centres” or “distribution centres”. This is notably the case where they can arrange for their regional headquarters to receive funds from elsewhere “for administrative purposes”. And for salaries of hundreds of people, coordinating activities of such corporations. In this sense only, they may be “non-governmental, non-profit organisations”. Some international “non-governmental organisations” are deliberately set up on government initiative or on the initiatives of strong multinational corporations with the consent of their respective Western governments. Unknown to many of their members, some may be “front” organisations set up by governments or large commercial interests for political or other purposes - even at the international level. They are provided with offices and subsidies by government throughout their existence, so that although they may have an international board of some kind, they are bound to the country of their origin. Therefore, non-governmental organisations of international level and their offshoots have targeted countries financially, administratively and theoretically subordinated them, and are working discreetly and indiscreetly for their controller countries who are pouring in money for specific objectives to be achieved. Those objectives are the desired goal of controlling the third world countries’ economies, finances, society and politics. They have a sustained and well-planned programme that is being followed with minute precision. Under this strategy, the first requirement is the “necessary disengagement of states from essential services such as health, school, and basic public amenities. This disengagement is parallel to the manner in which national budgets are increasingly “committed” to the “financing” of private sector profits, either by means of growing inroads into the budget to pay debts, or by means of state firms’ privatization plans - leading to the state property’s selling off. The NGOs find their rationale in the “logic” of creation and sustenance of “adjustment’s social nets”. They are implementing agents of a structural readjustment plan being thrust upon third world countries, which is quite in contrast with the social policies of Western countries when they were struggling with the devastation of the Second World War. NGOs’ plans, to some sociologists, are against the wider socio-economic and national interests of those countries. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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