PHA-Exchange> Attack on NGOs

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From: "David McCoy" <David.McCoy at lshtm.ac.uk>

Iraq-Attack Think Tank Turns Wrath on NGOs
By Jim Lobe
(excerpt)

WASHINGTON, Jun 12 (IPS) - Having led the charge to war in Iraq, an
influential think tank close to the Bush administration has added a new
target: international non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Not just any international NGOs, but especially, if not exclusively, those
with a "progressive" or "liberal" agenda that favours "global
governance" and other notions that are also are promoted by the United
Nations and other multilateral agencies.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) announced Wednesday that it, along
with another right-wing group, the Federalist Society for Law and Public

Policy Studies, is launching a new website (www.ngowatch.org) to expose the
funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs, and particularly
their alleged efforts to constrain U.S. freedom of action in international
affairs and influence the behaviour of corporations abroad.

They are especially alarmed by what they see as the naivete in dealing with
NGOs of both Bush administration and corporations that are providing
them with funding and other support. "In many cases, naive corporate
reformers, within corporations and in government, are welcoming them,"
complained
John Entine, an AEI fellow.

To mark the site's launch, AEI also held an all-day conference, entitled
'NGOs: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few,' which featured a series
of presentations depicting NGOs as a growing and largely unaccountable
threat to the Bush administration's foreign policy goals and free-market
capitalism around the world. The conference was co-sponsored by the
right-wing Australian think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

"NGOs have created their own rules and regulations and demanded that
governments and corporations abide by those rules", according to the
conference organisers. "Politicians and corporate leaders are often forced
to respond to the NGO media machine, and the resources of taxpayers and
shareholders are used in support of ends they did not sanction''.

"The extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the
potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies, as
well as the effectiveness of credible NGOs'', they said.

Both the website launch and Wednesday's conference might normally be
dismissed as a pep rally of a far right obsessed with left-wing and European
conspiracies to impose world government on the United States and destroy
capitalism.

But the fact that no less than 42 senior administration foreign-policy and
justice officials were recruited from AEI and the Federalists and that AEI
''fellows'' include such prominent figures as Lynne Cheney (the vice
president's spouse), former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the
influential Iraq hawk and former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board, Richard Perle, suggests that Wednesday's events may herald a much
more antagonistic attitude towards NGOs on the part of the government.

The conference was also held on the heels of harshly critical remarks late
last month by Andrew Natsios, the director of the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID), which often contracts with NGOs for
relief and development work. Among other charges, Natsios reportedly charged
that NGOs that received USAID funding for projects in Afghanistan and
elsewhere were not giving sufficient credit to the U.S. government as the
source of the aid.

His remarks coincided with moves by USAID to use more private contractors,
instead of NGOs, for work in Iraq and other countries, and impose stricter
rules regarding contacts between NGOs working on USAID projects and the
press that would reduce their independence.