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The doorway to mayhem
Bereket Gebru
After recently reading about HR 128, another one of the proposed resolutions that have to do with human rights in Ethiopia, I have decided to once again look into the issue of financing civil society organizations. Although HR 128 dealt with alleged impunity during the unrest in Ethiopia last year, the resolution somehow called for the Charities and Societies Proclamation to be scraped. That got me asking: why do the Americans desperately want to have that proclamation removed? A few insights into part of the answer are stated below with the case of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the major source of fund for numerous U.S. NGOs, treated as case study.
The status of human rights in individual countries across the world is increasingly analyzed and scrutinized by international organizations that claim to be non-governmental organizations working in the area. There are also numerous of these fake NGOs dealing with the rights of prisoners, journalists, local communities, and so on. The reports of governments on human rights conditions, prisoner handling, freedom of journalists and local communities are increasingly disregarded as irrelevant in the international system despite being directly responsible and having a much better infrastructure in place to find out about these things. Instead, these ill-equipped self-proclaimed NGOs garner recognition for their flawed reports through a network of media and political contacts.
These organizations have an international setting with offices in numerous countries. Despite their insistence to be considered non-governmental though, their funding originates from powerful governments and, therefore, should not be mistakenly taken as NGOs. They, however, boldly claim that ‘advocacy groups never accept any funding from government agencies as they are funded by their supporters and independent funding sources.’
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is one of those advocacy groups that claim to be NGOs. In addition to its own activities, NED is known for funding other advocacy groups. It has, however, was clearly stated in unclassified U.S. government documents that the government set up the organization as a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization (quango) in 1983. The unclassified documents released a few years ago indicate that NED is the product of “the democracy program.”
In a letter he sent to President Ronald Reagan on 27 July, 1983, along with a report entitled: “The Commitment to Democracy: A Bipartisan Approach”, Ambassador William E. Brock III, Executive Board Chairman of the program, wrote:
… It is with pleasure, therefore, that I present you with a copy of our basic report on behalf of the Executive Board of The Democracy Program. This report: “The Commitment to Democracy: A Bipartisan Approach,” recommends creation of a private non-profit Corporation, The National Endowment for Democracy, to assist our friends abroad in making democracy work. The Endowment’s authorizing legislation has passed the House and come up for Senate action in the very near future. We hope with Senate approval and a successful resolution of House and Senate bills in conference, that the Endowment can begin its work sometime this fall.
Other sources indicate that the 1967 scandal involving the CIA refers to “Ramparts” magazine’s revelation of some of the CIA’s covert operations. The report uncovered CIA operations of controlling and financing some 30 foreign syndicates, youth and university organizations and political institutions. Ramparts magazine published that the money went from the CIA, through the American private or fake front-organizations, to the actual beneficiaries overseas. The article shook the Congress and initiated the Senate hearing.
These sources further explain that the Senate investigation started only towards the end of 1970s. The sources state that these were the famous investigations of the Church’s Board, named after the Senator Frank Church. The Board published six reports which were very unfavorable for the CIA, and led to the reevaluation of its methods and purposes. They further stated that these reports uncovered the pervasive collusion of the CIA with the media and journalists. In this context, the big media manipulations and campaigns in various countries were mentioned, which had the purpose to diminish the political option which was deemed adverse to the American interests by the CIA. The sources further indicate that the investigation also revealed the assassinations of the ‘uncooperative’ foreign political leaders and state functionaries, the attempted coups against Fidel Castro, Chilean President Allende, etc.
These sources conclude: “In order to avoid the similar scandals and embarrassments which painted CIA in the negative light, at the start of the 1980s, CIA chief Casey suggested to President Reagan to conduct those same activities in a different way in the future. This is how the NED was established as an allegedly non-governmental organization, since it was assessed that an organization with the ‘non-governmental’ prefix will be able to act with more elegance in foreign countries.”
The report entitled “The Commitment to Democracy: A Bipartisan Approach” included a summary of its initial recommendations. The first of these recommendations is that “Congress should establish at the earliest possible opportunity a National Endowment for Democracy as a private, non-profit Corporation. This section of the recommendation further states that “the Endowment, though not an agency of the United Stated government, would receive annual funding from the government beginning in fiscal year 1984 and be subject to the appropriate oversight procedures of Congress.”
Currently, NED’s homepage describes the Endowment as a private, non-profit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. However, as has been clearly indicated above, there is nothing private about NED which receives annual funding from the government and is directly controlled by Congress through its oversight procedures.
The fact that it is a governmental organization, in turn, means that it carries out activities geared towards realizing the political and economic interests the US government wants to promote. A NED director once credited the organization for carrying out CIA’s covert activities overtly.
NED’s website states that it makes one thousand grants every year. However, it does not provide a list of the recipients of its funds. The status of NED as a recipient and distributor of governmental funds to other advocacy groups, however, indirectly shows that some advocacy groups that have close working relations with the U.S. government might receive funds from the Endowment.
One of such advocacy groups is Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW is known for the “revolving door” relationship it has with the U.S. government. A revolving door policy refers to the cycle of exchange of personnel between governmental offices and the private/NGO sector. In such cases, government officials hold positions of leadership in private firms and NGOs for a certain time before they move back to public office. On the other side, executives of private firms or NGOs join the public sector for a certain time only to move back to related private sector jobs after a while. The conflict of interest and the use of office to promote the interests of the offices they go back to are very much vivid in such cases. When these people go back to the sector they came from, they take with them the accumulated knowledge and relationships and intimate understanding of the functioning of the offices to their new positions.
Two Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and over 100 academics, journalists, and human rights activists signed a letter calling on the HRW to refrain from its improper affinity with the U.S. government. The letter called on the organization to end its exchange of personnel with the U.S. government, arguing that the relationship has affected HRW’s research and advocacy against human rights abuses, particularly those committed by the U.S. government.
It is these so-called advocacy groups that regularly come up with negative reports that constantly disrespect the efforts of governments to do away with poverty and human rights violations. These corrupt and deceptive organizations keep denouncing governments that do not necessarily follow the detrimental policies the U.S. government and the international financial institutions it controls shove down everybody’s throat. Therefore, their duty is to make sure that state actors abide by the rules of the superpower.
Whether it be the NED that is directly controlled by Congress through its oversight procedures or HRW that implements government policies through its revolving door relations with the government, it is clear that these organizations are not non-governmental. The best they can be, as stated by the unclassified U.S. government report on the governmental establishment of NED, is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization. Their close relations with the U.S. government and the media along with their government funding clearly shows that they are government agents created to advance U.S. interests.
