Development Hijacked




By Najma Sadeque


THE ‘war on terror’ has been very good for authoritarian governments worldwide, especially those that pose as democracies. For over half a decade, the world has witnessed the peak of unilateral and brutal power. To some northern governments, it gave enormous arbitrary control over their Muslim citizens and ‘guest workers’ from abroad.

The highly-paid spin doctors of the perpetuators of the war created enough convincing fiction that any and every Muslim could be a terrorist or a potential one. The laws were twisted around enough in effect to presume anyone guilty until proven innocent.

In the South the ‘war on terror’ has shrugged off such niceties as parliamentary discussion and consensus, notwithstanding US protestations that a price has to be paid for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ which the Bush government defines to suit itself.

For the allies of the US in the North who did not want to be part of the ‘war on terror’, the expediency is clear. But for southern allies, it was a double-edge sword: some were given a choice and helpless citizens would certainly support not being bombed. Those who did not harbour such fears, embraced it nonetheless — after all, it gave a pretext to strengthen absolute rule, and provided the extra military sweeteners that came for free.

Somewhere along the way, development took a hit. Earlier, the West had withdrawn from colonisation when it decided it didn’t want to stay in a state of perpetual war and self-endangerment against restless, resentful natives: it found mutually-agreed-on trade a better way to get the same raw materials from the South.

Whether to assuage feelings of guilt over the plunder by their previous generations, or the belief that direct assistance to civil society instead of exclusively to governments that often tended to behave like local colonials, many northern countries began to extend support to NGOs in a range of sectors from health, education, environment to self-reliance and advocacy programmes.

In most cases, governments were content to let NGOs take up where the state was failing, especially when World Bank/IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies struck down the poor who constituted the majority.

But there were also NGOs that focused on informing people and making them think and act for themselves. That did not always go down well with some governments, whether aid recipients or donors. At the same time, many social welfare and other organisations based where most needed — as they are supposed to be — also happen to be located in areas or take up activities of ‘strategic’ interest or ‘concern’ to donor governments.

This confusing or deliberate melding of contradictory donor objectives with local and national goals and activities led to western governments increasingly viewing ‘developing’ countries as homogeneous components on the global map rather than unique sovereign entities. In this scenario, donors had to balance the near-impossible task of juggling northern trade and investment interests and military objectives with southern subservience.

Furthermore, this also affected the freedom of private, independent NGOs from the North giving assistance to organisations in the South. Legislation can be hard on charity organisations that are clearly not involved in guerrilla activities but which feel bound to extend their humanitarian assistance to all victims of conflict irrespective of their real or perceived allegiance.

This transition has not gone unnoticed and NGOs have been reacting in various countries where affected, some with caution so as not lose the ability to do what good they can, and fewer taking the risk of thinking aloud. Over the past couple of years, INTRAC, a UK-based international training and research NGO, addressed these concerns at consultations in half a dozen different geographical regions including South Asia and the Middle East. INTRAC revealed some interesting linked actions.

Since 2001, American NGOs have been required to report regularly on all their activities to the US State Department. The most chilling of the many directives that followed was the Patriot Act which gave the authorities the unquestioned power to control people, borders and civil society organisations. All US NGOs actually have to guarantee under the Terrorism Certification Act that their funding is not being used to provide material support to terrorists or terrorists organisations.

Consequently, those NGOs doing humanitarian work in areas or for groups that the US does not favour — even if they are innocent victims — risk losing their funding altogether. In US eyes, anything and everything can be termed a ‘security’ issue. Equally alarming has been the enactment of legislation and codes of conduct initiated by the US (with the UK in tow) and imposed on other governments as a collaborative measure in the ‘war on terror’.

It includes the monitoring of all kinds of civil society organisations for the origins and use of their foreign funding but which include NGO development and advocacy work. This can and has led to the harassment and freezing of NGO funds especially those doing advocacy work and working against human rights violations, such as the disappearance of countless social activists.

Significantly, the UK Home Office Review has renamed itself as the Department of ‘Homeland Security’. The UK British Overseas NGOs for Development (BOND) objected to NGOs being forced to associate themselves so closely with this regulatory body, as it seemed that charities were being singled out by cultural or religious identity.

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the main umbrella body for UK NGOs (NCVO) supported their reservation. BOND requested the UK government to clarify the matter, pointing out that “lists proscribed in the US, especially where no evidence has been made public, cannot automatically be enforced in the UK”.

Everyone knows the absurdity that is the ‘war on terror’ cannot last forever. America has stretched its financial as well as human resources much too thin with a war that costs it almost $4,000 per second at the same time that the dollar is taking a daily plunge, while its citizenry suffers moral and economic breakdown. It has degenerated into a war of stubborn attrition, and the US has long since lost respect and standing in the world’s eyes.

But that is poor consolation to those in the South facing death or a future-less existence. Ultimately, countries will pick up the pieces towards rebuilding and mutual peace — for which even more help will be needed from the NGOs — making the ‘war on terror’ a totally unnecessary and fruitless exercise. The irony is that in the process the South will have paid the greater price with over a million innocent lives lost and a country destroyed and several others crippled.