The Role Of NGOs: "We are not instruments of US power "

These arguments, on both sides, grossly simplify an often surprising series of events with complicated local causes. They take us back to an outmoded chessboard view of geopolitics. But where this gets dangerous is when particular groups are blamed for their part in the overthrow or attempted overthrow of governments. Nowhere is this more unfair than when non-governmental organisations are assigned roles in this supposed drama.

Media development groups such as the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), on the board of which I have served for some years, especially attract suspicion because of the evident fact that even an intermittently independent press can sometimes help to undermine an oppressive government. These organisations get most of their funds from western governments and provide assistance to local journalists critical of their own governments, and those governments then sometimes fall. Ergo, the argument runs, they are as much in the business of regime change as the Bush administration and are, wittingly or unwittingly, instruments of American power.

This nonsense finds its fullest expression in coverage such as that in a recent Moscow News piece on Uzbekistan which, under the subheading Quiet Americans, noted that reporters with connections to IWPR mysteriously appeared wherever there was trouble and suggested that IWPR had "provoked the people to take to the streets". The writer did not explain where good reporters are supposed to go, if not to places where important events are taking place, nor how IWPR's handful of overworked contributors could start rebellions in provincial towns. These IWPR contributors, after all, are themselves local journalists trying to exercise the right to free expression.

Such a story might be expected in the Moscow News, no longer the independent paper it used to be. But it is saddening to see references in a recent article on these pages by John Laughland also hinting at a shadowy role. It bears repeating that allegations have consequences. Those who work for IWPR and similar organisations are put at risk, and the work that IWPR does is put at risk.

It is true that all NGOs, except those exclusively concerned with succour and relief, are about change. It is also true that, somewhere on the outer rim of their vision, this may include change of regime, not as an aim but as a consequence. Digging wells, teaching birth-control techniques, starting weaving classes, helping refugees or developing a training programme for journalists - all are political acts, and in certain circumstances can be part of the chemistry leading to a change of government. They can also be, of course, part of the chemistry leading to a strengthening of a particular government.

It would be ludicrous to say that the people who first set up IWPR as an organisation to help independent media survive in what had been Yugoslavia were totally neutral about the regimes in power there at that time. And now that IWPR is operating in a range of countries, it would be misleading to say that IWPR's programme in Iraq, for instance, might not, if successful, help in a small way toward establishing a more stable government there. But the fate of regimes and governments should not be the direct concern of NGOs. Those who warn of such slippage toward the overtly political are right - but wrong when they claim it has happened when it has not.

If NGOs are not tools of western governments in the direct sense, are they nevertheless becoming so indirectly? The growth of NGOs in the 80s and 90s came about in part because governments wanted to privatise and delegate certain functions. David Rieff showed in his book A Bed for the Night how this enabled them both to avoid intervention, as in Rwanda and Bosnia, and to endorse it, as in Kosovo and Iraq. As Rieff said, the "space between the great powers' interest and humanitarian enterprise" shrank. Although things have changed somewhat since then, to deny that government funding decisions affect what most NGOs do would be stupid.

But NGO fundraising is a diverse, mobile and indeed chaotic activity. An array of NGOs, very different in their origins, cultures and purposes, faces an equally large and equally mixed array of governments, foundations, benefactors and publics in a complex process of bargaining and bidding. Among governments the United States and among philanthropists George Soros have especial weight. They certainly exercise more influence than other actors - but they are a very long way indeed from determining what NGOs do and do not do.

Fashions among donors come and go, often just a product of the way in which new news displaces old news, so that yesterday's worthy cause becomes today's ho-hum. Sometimes the shifts reflect analysis, well grounded or otherwise, of the effectiveness of particular activities. And there are politically driven realignments. But there is canniness on both sides. Every NGO knows how to dress up the programmes it really cares about in whatever is the vocabulary of the moment so as to preserve them without much change.

The growth of NGOs over the last 20 years has been, on balance, a gain for the world. Their attitude to governments that have promoted them when it suited and disowned them when it didn't veers back and forth. Governments certainly do wish to use them. But NGOs' commitment to their own aims - in the case of IWPR to providing the skills and resources that will help people determine their own fate - remains solid. To discern in the complex world of NGO-government relations a pattern in which NGOs, or some of them, act as the arms of a Washington-directed destabilisation programme is not only intellectually wrong but, in a situation where the life and liberty of brave people can so easily be threatened, almost criminally irresponsible.

m.woollacott [at] guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1494352,00.html