Bush and NGOs

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

Bush to NGOs: Watch your mouths
By NAOMI KLEIN
Friday, Jun. 20, 2003
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The Bush administration has found its next target for pre-emptive
war, but it's not Iran, Syria or North Korea -- not yet, anyway.

Before launching any new foreign adventures, the Bush gang has some
homeland housekeeping to take care of: It is going to sweep up those
pesky non-governmental organizations that are helping to turn world
opinion against U.S. bombs and brands.

The war on NGOs is being fought on two clear fronts. One buys the
silence and complicity of mainstream humanitarian and religious
groups by offering lucrative reconstruction contracts. The other
marginalizes and criminalizes more independent-minded NGOs by
claiming that their work is a threat to democracy. The U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID) is in charge of handing out the
carrots, while the American Enterprise Institute, the most powerful
think tank in Washington, D.C., is wielding the sticks.

On May 21 in Washington, Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID, gave a
speech blasting U.S. NGOs for failing to play a role many of them
didn't realize they had been assigned: doing public relations for the
U.S. government. According to InterAction, the network of 160 relief
and development NGOs that hosted the conference, Mr. Natsios was
"irritated" that starving and sick Iraqi and Afghan children didn't
realize that their food and vaccines were coming to them courtesy of
George W. Bush. From now on, NGOs had to do a better job of linking
their humanitarian assistance to U.S. foreign policy and making it
clear that they are "an arm of the U.S. government." If they didn't,
InterAction reported, "Natsios threatened to personally tear up their
contracts and find new partners."

For aid workers, there are even more strings attached to U.S.
dollars. USAID told several NGOs that have been awarded humanitarian
contracts that they cannot speak to the media -- all requests from
reporters must go through Washington. Mary McClymont, CEO of
InterAction, calls the demands
"unprecedented," and says, "It looks like the NGOs aren't independent
and can't speak for themselves about what they see and think."

Many humanitarian leaders are shocked to hear their work described as
"an arm" of government; most see themselves as independent (that
would be the "non-governmental" part of the name).

The best NGOs are loyal to their causes, not to countries, and they
aren't afraid to blow the whistle on their own governments. Think of
Medecins sans frontieres standing up to the White House and the
European Union over AIDS drug patents, or Human Rights Watch's
campaign against the death penalty in the United States. Mr. Natsios
himself embraced this independence in his previous job as
vice-president of World Vision. During the North Korean famine, he
didn't hesitate to blast his own government for withholding food aid,
calling the Clinton administration's response "too slow" and its claim
that politics was not a factor "total nonsense."

Don't expect candour like that from the aid groups Mr. Natsios now
oversees in Iraq. These days, NGOs are supposed to do nothing more
than quietly pass out care packages with a big "brought to you by the
U.S.A." logo attached -- in public-private partnerships with Bechtel
and Halliburton, of course.

That is the message of NGO Watch, an initiative of the American
Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society for Law and Public
Policy Studies, which takes aim at the growing political influence of
the non-profit sector. The stated purpose of the Web site, launched
on June 11, is to "bring clarity and accountability to the burgeoning
world of NGOs."

In fact, it is a McCarthyite blacklist, telling tales on any NGO that
dares speak against Bush administration policies or in support of
international treaties opposed by the White House.

This bizarre initiative takes as its premise the idea that there is
something sinister about "unelected" groups of citizens getting
together to try to influence their government.  "The extraordinary
growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential to
undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies," the site
claims.

Coming from the AEI, this is not without irony.   As Raj Patel,
policy analyst at the California-based NGO Food First, points out,
"The American Enterprise Institute is an NGO itself and it is
supported by the most powerful corporations on the planet. They are
accountable only to their board, which includes Motorola, American
Express and ExxonMobil."  As for influence, few peddle it quite like
the AEI, the looniest ideas of which have a way of becoming Bush
administration policy.  And no wonder. Richard
Perle, member and former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board, is an AEI fellow, along with Lynne Cheney, wife of the
vice-president; the Bush administration is crowded with former AEI
fellows.

As President Bush said at an AEI dinner in February, "At the American
Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at
work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation.  You do such
good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds."  In
other words, the AEI is more than a think tank; it's Mr. Bush's
outsourced brain.

Taken together with Mr. Natsios's statements, this attack on the
non-profit sector marks the emergence of a new Bush doctrine:  NGOs
should be nothing more than the good-hearted charity wing of the
military, silently mopping up after wars and famines.  Their job is
not to ask how these tragedies could have been averted, or to
advocate for policy solutions.  And it is certainly not to join
anti-war and
fair-trade movements pushing for real political change.

The control freaks in the White House have really outdone themselves
this time.  First they tried to silence governments critical of their
foreign policies by buying them off with aid packages and trade
deals.  (Last month U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said
that the United States would only enter into new trade agreements
with countries that offered "co-operation or better on foreign policy
and security issues.")  Next, they made sure the press didn't ask
hard question during the war by trading
journalistic access for editorial control.

Now they are attempting to turn relief workers in Iraq and
Afghanistan into publicists for Mr. Bush's Brand U.S.A., to embed
them in the Pentagon, like Fox News reporters.

The U.S. government is usually described as "unilateralist," but I
don't think that's quite accurate.  The Bush administration may be
willing to go it alone, but what it really wants is legions of
self-censoring followers, from foreign governments to national
journalists and international NGOs.

This is not a lone wolf we are dealing with, it's a sheep-herder. The
question is:  Which of the NGOs will play the sheep?

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows.