Comment by Riaz Haq on December 25, 2016 at 8:43pm

Excerpt  on "NGOs" and "Civil Society" from "Force Multipliers: The Instrumentalities of Imperialism" by Maximilian Forte:

Force Multipliers, partners, intermediaries, agents of change---all of these are contained in the State Department's language, as it perfectly echoes the terms in favour in the military. The State Department makes it plain that it intends to use NGOs abroad as tools of US foreign policy, frequently using "civil society" as a rhetorically pretentious cover:

" We will reach beyond governments to offer a place at the table to groups and citizens willing to shoulder a fair share of the burden. Our efforts to engage beyond the state begin with outreach to civil society--activists, organizations, congregations, journalists who work through peaceful means to make their countries better. While civil society is varied, many groups have common goals with the United States, and working with civil society be effective and efficient path to advance our foreign policy goals". (DoS, 2010, pp 21-22)

https://books.google.com/books?id=isS7CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=... 

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 14, 2017 at 7:53am

Pakistan orders expulsion of 29 international NGOs

https://www.ft.com/content/15d38124-de54-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c

“In Pakistan, India and Nepal, space is closing in which NGOs are able to operate,” said Binaifer Nowrojee, head of Asia-Pacific for Open Society Foundations, one of the groups banned by Pakistan.

“It comes along with a growing national pride and economic confidence in these countries. They feel that the era of being dictated to by the west is coming to an end.”

A doctor in Pakistan who helped track down bin Laden told investigators he had been introduced to the CIA by a senior Save the Children official. The charity said it had never employed the doctor but the organisation was thrown out of the country in 2012.

Pakistan’s government two years ago announced a registration regime for all international NGOs and cancelled agreements with 15 of them.

However, the latest expulsions are different because many of the organisations affected are not involved in promoting human rights or good governance — activities that frequently irritate authoritarian governments.

Officials at Pakistan’s home ministry said some of the groups had attracted the government’s attention because they operated in parts of the country where militancy was high and where Pakistan suspected western intelligence agencies also operated.

One senior government official told the Financial Times that the government had also grown suspicious of the high salaries paid by some organisations, and wondered whether they were being used to fund intelligence work on behalf of foreign governments. All the charities contacted by the FT denied this was the case.

The Pakistani move follows a similar push by its neighbour India to restrict NGOs that receive foreign funding.

In 2015 New Delhi put the Ford Foundation on a watch list and suspended Greenpeace India’s licence. This year it banned foreign funding for the Public Health Foundation of India, a group backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, saying it used foreign donations to “lobby” for tobacco-control policy issues.

Human rights campaigners say the moves to hamper foreign NGOs are part of a broader move against civil society across the region, which includes what campaigners say are forced disappearances of activists who upset governments.

In Pakistan hundreds of activists have disappeared over the past few years. But while the disappearances were previously mainly limited to restive areas of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, they now appear to be spreading into the country’s big cities.

Raza Khan, a peace activist who has advocated a rapprochement with India, went missing from Lahore this month.

Similar disappearances have occurred in Bangladesh. The most recent case involves Mubashar Hasan, an assistant professor at a Dhaka university who researched terrorism. His friends say they suspect he is being held by security forces — a claim authorities deny.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 14, 2017 at 8:43am

Stephen Kinzer, author of "The (John Foster and Allan Dulles) Brothers", says the brothers preferred " open society" in foreign lands because is "very easy for covert operatives to penetrate that society and corrupt it". 

https://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/234752747/meet-the-brothers-who-shap...

On the Dulles' ability to overthrow regimes in Iran and Guatemala but not in Cuba or Vietnam

They were able to succeed [at regime change] in Iran and Guatemala because those were democratic societies, they were open societies. They had free press; there were all kinds of independent organizations; there were professional groups; there were labor unions; there were student groups; there were religious organizations. When you have an open society, it's very easy for covert operatives to penetrate that society and corrupt it.

Actually, one of the people who happened to be in Guatemala at the time of the coup there was the young Argentine physician Che Guevara. Later on, Che Guevara made his way to Mexico and met Fidel Castro. Castro asked him, "What happened in Guatemala?" He was fascinated; they spent long hours talking about it, and Che Guevara reported to him ... "The CIA was able to succeed because this was an open society." It was at that moment that they decided, "If we take over in Cuba, we can't allow democracy. We have to have a dictatorship. No free press, no independent organizations, because otherwise the CIA will come in and overthrow us." In fact, Castro made a speech after taking power with [Guatemalan President Jacobo] Árbenz sitting right next to him and said, "Cuba will not be like Guatemala."

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 14, 2017 at 10:41am

The rise of NGO's and their harmful impact on Pakistan
Faiza Shah

https://herald.dawn.com/news/1152863

The extraordinary growth that NGOs have experienced in recent years in their numbers, their outreach and their resources is unprecedented even by Pakistani standards. The number of active NGOs in the country is, at the very least, anywhere between 100,000 to 150,000, investigations by the Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy (PCP), a certification organisation for NGOs and charity institutions, reveal. By this count, there is at least one NGO for every 2,000 people. Way back in 2001, a Civil Society Index put together by the Aga Khan Foundation in Pakistan, in coordination with Civicus, an international alliance of civil society groups, put the number of “active and registered NGOs in Pakistan” at “around 10,000 to 12,000”.

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Such focus on NGOs, as mentioned in the index, has made civil society synonymous with NGOs — in Pakistan, as well as in most of the third world. Many academics feel NGOs are actually part of the neo-liberal agenda to roll back the state, open international borders for globalised commerce, deregulate labour markets to make hiring and firing easy and push all service provision into the hands of the private sector. In such a situation, the third sector no longer remains distinct from the public and the private sectors.

“Our civil society has become hegemonic in itself. Certain highly funded NGOs and consortiums of NGOs dominate the civil society scene to such an extent that even the state seems much less powerful as compared to them,” says Dr Rubina Saigol, a Lahore-based sociologist and independent analyst who has vast experience of working with the third sector. Whereas civil society, as a broad term, is understood to play an important role in pushing society towards an egalitarian and progressive path, in its NGO avatar it is no longer just an informal or incidental component of society. It, indeed, is another word for highly bureaucratised institutions, with a lot of resources to do good work but suffering from all the ills that bureaucracy brings in its wake: inertia, mismanagement and corruption.

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Of course, such systemic weaknesses cannot be wholly ascribed to corrupt practices by NGOs or the political agendas of the donors. But their impact is immediately felt in the form of missing development work that otherwise should have been carried out. A press release announcing that USAID will provide 1.6 billion dollars to Pakistan for development activities over a five year period will be carried in all international newspapers and could be seen as a way to disburse the money in a transparent manner, but there won’t be any headlines when that money is stuck at a high level programme director’s office, not converted into the amenities or infrastructure that it was meant for, such as schools or hospitals. “This is where a lot of NGOs are not as effective as they could be because of poor systems and governance,” says a development activist without wanting to be named.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 29, 2017 at 10:25am

Exclusive: Aid charities reluctant to reveal full scale of fraud
Tom Esslemont
Reuters

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aid-business-fraud/exclusive-aid...

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - With fraud rife in conflict and disaster zones, aid charities are under pressure to be open about corruption but one third of the world’s 25 biggest aid charities declined to make their fraud data public in a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation.

Data collected from 12 of the 25 humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with the greatest expenditure shows annual losses of $2.7 million - or just 0.03 pct of annual turnover based on data supplied for the years 2009-2014.

Transparency experts said the real figure would likely be far higher if data was available with these major aid relief groups estimated to spend $18 billion a year globally.

Eight of the biggest NGOs questioned in a pioneering survey on accountability in charitable aid declined to elaborate, saying they reported their losses to regulators. Five of the biggest NGOs said they had not experienced any diversions of funds during this period.

“Most NGOs in many cases will not report fraud as fraud because they will have a long paper trail coming after them,” said transparency and development researcher, Till Bruckner, author of the book “Aid Without Accountability”.

---
The 2010 Haiti earthquake - which saw Haitians accuse local authorities of deliberately holding up aid distributions - forced a rethink in the NGO sector, says Craig Fagan, head of policy at global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International.

“I would say in the last five years there has been a turning of the tide,” Fagan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.


“[There has been] a realization, at least at a global level, that this is part of their licence to operate, that charities need to be accountable in a 360-degree way with people they are working with and those funding them.”

Mercy Corps said it had been defrauded in its Afghanistan program in 2011, when a staff member absconded with funds worth $257,670 after cashing a check he had altered.

A spokeswoman said the loss, which was recovered through the charity’s insurance policy, accounted for 0.09 percent of that year’s total revenue and that Mercy Corps altered its banking relationship to prevent the problem recurring.

World Vision International, the largest humanitarian NGO in the world in expenditure terms, said $1 million (0.01 percent) of its resources went missing between 2009 and 2013.

A spokesman for the charity said this was largely down to two significant incidents, both in World Vision’s Zambia office.

The first, amounting to $262,000, resulted from collusion between staff and outside vendors and bankers, while the second, amounting to $306,000, was related to internal staff fraud in procurement transactions.


-------------

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) revealed 14 cases of financial irregularities in nine countries, including Liberia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its biggest financial loss was in Colombia, where $50,000 worth of building materials did not reach the intended beneficiaries.

“A staff member admitted to having misappropriated the funds and was dismissed,” an NRC spokesman explained.

Those defrauded said the problem was not simply one of theft.

“Corruption includes cases where the organization faces theft, bribery, embezzlement, nepotism, facilitation payments, deception, extortion, abuse of power,” said a spokesman for the medical relief charity MSF.

The MSF spokesman said in a separate incident, $790,000 of material goods were looted or stolen from its premises in the Central African Republic in 2014.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 22, 2018 at 8:13pm

Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy Tool 


http://politics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.00...

The majority of countries around the world are engaged in the foreign aid process, as donors, recipients, or, oftentimes, both. States use foreign aid as a means of pursuing foreign policy objectives. Aid can be withdrawn to create economic hardship or to destabilize an unfriendly or ideologically antagonistic regime. Or, conversely, aid can be provided to bolster and reward a friendly or compliant regime.

Although foreign aid serves several purposes, and not least among them the wish to increase human welfare, the primary reason for aid allocations or aid restrictions is to pursue foreign policy goals. Strategic and commercial interests of donor countries are the driving force behind many aid programs. Not only do target countries respond to the granting of bilateral and multilateral aid as an incentive, but also the threat of aid termination serves as an effective deterrent. Both the granting and the denial of foreign assistance can be a valuable mechanism designed to modify a recipient state’s behavior.

Donors decide which countries will receive aid, the amount of aid provided, the time frame in which aid is given, and the channel of aid delivery. The donor’s intentions and the recipient’s level of governance determine the type or sector of foreign aid. States can choose between bilateral or multilateral methods of disbursing foreign assistance in order to pursue their interests. Although bilateral disbursements allow the donor state to have complete control over the aid donation, the use of multilateral forums has its advantages. Multilateral aid is cheaper, it disperses accountability, and it is often viewed as less politically biased

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Bilateral aid can be delivered through the public sector, NGOs, or public-private partnerships with the recipient country. Those who advocate the use of foreign aid as a geopolitical foreign policy tool prefer bilateral foreign aid because of the strategic objectives to be gained. With bilateral aid, the donor retains control over the funds and determines who will be favored with aid and under what conditions. Most foreign aid is overseen, and frequently managed, by the donor (Riddell, 2014). Donors do not like to give up control of their aid4 by channeling it through a multilateral agency, unless, of course, they have significant influence over the decision-making operations of the agency. The receipt of bilateral foreign assistance leaves the recipient obligated to the donor.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 2, 2018 at 10:43am

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/20/the-useful-altruists-how-ng...


1) NGOs undermine, divert, and replace autonomous mass organizing.

NGOs have come to occupy a central role in social movements and political activism in the US and elsewhere —what Arundhati Roy calls the “NGO-ization of resistance.”

Sincere people often believe that they will be able to “get paid to do good,” but this is a fantasy. Nina Power writes that “there is no longer any separation between the private realm and the working day,” contending that “the personal is no longer just political, it’s economic through and through.” While she does not explicitly make this connection herself, the mushrooming of “social justice” and political NGOs is a good example of the erosion of this separation.

For those of us involved in organizing, there is an eerily familiar pattern: Some atrocity happens, outraged people pour into the streets, and once together, someone announces a meeting to follow up and continue the struggle. At this meeting, several experienced organizers seem to be in charge. These activists open with radical language and offer to provide training and a regular meeting space. They seem to already have a plan figured out, whereas everyone else has barely had time to think about the next step. The activists exude competence, explaining—with diagrams—how to map out potential allies, as they craft a list of specific politicians to target with protests.

They formulate simplistic “asks” to “build confidence with a quick win” and anyone who suggests a different approach — perhaps one involving the voices of people other than the mysterious default leaders — is passive-aggressively ignored. Under their guidance, everyone mobilizes to occupy some institution or the office of a politician, or to hold a march and rally. The protest is loud and passionate and seems quite militant, yet, the next thing you know, you find yourself knocking on a stranger’s door, clipboard in hand, hoping to convince them to vote in the next election.

There are certainly variations on this theme, but the central point remains: NGOs exist to undermine mass struggle, divert it into reformist dead ends, and supplant it. For example, at many “Fight for $15” demonstrations in Miami, the vast majority of participants were paid activists, employees of NGOs, CBOs (Community Based Organizations), and union staff seeking potential members. Similarly, some Black Lives Matter protests in Miami have been led and largely populated by paid activists who need to demonstrate that they are “organizing the community” in order to win their next grant.

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Activism is being capitalized and professionalized. Instead of organizing the masses to fight for their interests, NGOs use them for their own benefit. Instead of building a mass movement, they manage public outrage. Instead of developing radical or revolutionary militants, they develop paid but ineffective activists along with passive recipients of assistance.


2) NGOs are a tool of imperialism.

Military invasions, or the threat of invasion, still play an indispensable role in aiding imperialist1 countries in their quest to extract and exploit resources and labor in the global periphery. But the “boots on the ground” tactic has more and more become a measure of last resort in a broader, more comprehensive strategy of control that today also includes less costly and socially disruptive methods.

NGOs, like missionaries, are used to penetrate an area to prepare favorable conditions for agribusiness for export, sweatshops, resource mines, and tourist playgrounds. While these days military action is usually characterized (at least to the home population) as a humanitarian intervention, the ostensibly humanitarian character of NGOs seems to justify itself. But it is essential to apply the same critical eye to NGO interventions that we do to military interventions.

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