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Most NGOs In Iraq Losing Face
BAGHDAD - Welcomed at first after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, most NGOs have run into scepticism and mistrust. Few remain to help.
Hundreds of local and foreign NGOs became active in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, after decades of restrictions under the regime of former dictator Saddam Hussein.
"The former Iraqi regime did not trust NGOs, and always thought them to be spies," Muath A'raji of the National Societal Organisation, a human rights NGO based in Baghdad told IPS. "Iraqis used to think the regime was wrong, but now they have changed their minds because of the many false foreign NGOs that look more like contracting companies than humanitarian and human rights organisations."
Iraqis expected NGOs to ease the agonies caused by both the U.S. occupation and corruption of the Iraqi government. But now most appear to believe that NGOs work for money and personal interests, if not for intelligence and missionary purposes.
Talk of NGOs now often inspires fear rather than hope. "I was terrified when I heard of French organisations smuggling children from Chad to sell in Europe," says Um Yassen, whose six-year-old son was injured by a U.S. bomb in Fallujah. "I have applied for many NGOs to take him for treatment abroad. We do not know who to trust any more."
But there is still the occasional NGO genuinely assisting Iraqis in need.
"Dozens of organisations took my niece's medical reports and pictures; only one came back to take her for treatment abroad," Anwer Abdul Hameed from Hit, just west of Baghdad, told IPS. "Our five-year-old Nora was shot in the head by an American sniper in 2005. Her father took her to many Iraqi hospitals. Doctors did their very best, but with the hospitals practically not working and medicines not available, Nora's head remained broken until an organisation called No More Victims appeared and took her to Amman on way to America."
No More Victims is a Los Angeles based organisation that takes Iraqi children injured by occupation forces to the United States for treatment.
The hundreds of Iraqi NGOs spread all over the country seem to have lost credibility too, along with most foreign NGOs.
People in Fallujah, 69km west of Baghdad, told IPS that some associations that helped them during the 2004 sieges disappeared after some of their activists were detained by the U.S. military.
"The good men who served the city were either detained or forced to flee the country under threat of detention or even termination by secret police squads," an Iraqi doctor in Fallujah, speaking on terms of anonymity, told IPS. "Most of the ones who are active now belong to parties in power or people who know nothing about organised work. The Iraqi Red Crescent, for example, is totally dominated by Iraqi Prime Minister (Nouri al) Maliki's Da'wa Party."
A member of the Iraqi Red Crescent IRC in Fallujah denied that the Da'wa Party controls the organisation, but refused to answer IPS questions about the way they work.
Danger is clearly an inhibiting factor as well. The NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI), an independent initiative launched by a group of NGOs in Baghdad in April 2003, now comprises a network of about 80 international NGOs and 200 Iraqi NGOs.
The group does not provide a list of NGOs operating in Iraq because of "security concerns", according to their website. "With the high risks taken by aid workers on the ground, at least 94 aid workers have been killed in Iraq since 2003 (updated on 27th of September 2007)," the group says.
NCCI adds: "Our data takes in consideration incidents reported to NCCI. As aid workers face the same difficulties as any civilians in Iraq, the figure could certainly be higher, particularly regarding local NGO staff."
Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region.
© 2008 Inter Press Service
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Show AllNGOs lost their way long ago, when they became "partners" with powerful governments and actors. As Nichols Guilhot described in his book, The Democracy Makers, the very term '"NGO" has become meaningless':
They [government or quasi-government institutions and businesses] are now speaking a language that, once upon a time, belonged exclusively to protesters, campaigners, dissenters, or committed citizens. And so, this professionalization of activism also corresponds to the migration of socially progressive repertoires of collective action, inherited from anti-imperialist campaigns, struggles for rights, emancipatory causes, from social movements often opposing state institutions to the most dominant state institutions themselves. By the same token, the very same institutions that were associated with the cold war and were then most often attacked in the name of human rights or democracy are today at the cutting edge of a new global democratic activism. The U.S. State Department, once the foe of the human rights movement, claims now to be supporting transnational issue networks in the field of human rights; the World Bank, attacked in the past for indirectly supporting authoritarian forms of modernization in developing countries, now purports to follow exclusively "bottom-up" methodologies and "grass-roots" approaches, and promotes political participation, the rule of law and "good governance". Market forces have not been lagging behind: faced with growing criticism, multinational corporations have developed ethical strategies meant to respond to this challenge. They sell not only commodities but also, increasingly, values, commitment, environmental awareness, or social responsibility...
This is not to say that NGOs are subservient to the needs or the interests of developed countries, that they are the Trojan horses of neoliberal globalization, or that they have been simply co-opted--although such strategies are sometimes deliberately pursued by foundations (Roelofs 2003). Many of them obviously engage critically with problematic aspects of globalization and sometimes successfully confront powerful organized interests. But, overall, NGOs as such have become key regulatory actors of globalization, on equal footing with financial institution or international organization. As a result of this success, their identity has been dissolved in a seamless web of "global governance" where they interact and sometimes overlap with government agencies, international organizations, and corporations. The NGO "format" has become a specific modality of the exercise of power. The very label "NGO" has become meaningless and political scientists are at pain attempting to classify the plethora of international institutional forms cohabiting under this label, ranging from state-sponsored organizations and international networks of professionals to neighborhood associations.
Horrific situation is and has been (for nearly 20 years due to the U.S. and its fiend "allies) Iraq, and I find Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail's article to be excellent; not long, but providing a very serious picture of the reality that Iraq's been and continues to be due to this second U.S. war of aggression. Gulf War I wasn't obviously of aggression, but the GHW Bush administration tricked Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, which I've learned from some people and authors who certainly seem to know what they're talking about, and it does make sense, what they say; well, Saddam wanted to stop Kuwait's stealing of Iraq's oil resources through the use of slanted drilling for oil, a technique developed in Alberta, Canada (from what I've learned anyway). Perhaps he also wanted to try to make Kuwait part of Iraq again, as it was prior to the British imposition of separation for the sake of profits for Big Oil of Britain (and, I guess, of other western, imperialist, ... countries).
And excellent post, sl63.
I very much appreciate the honest depiction of the NGO reality that Nichols Guilhot wrote of. It's obvious enough that this world is full of imperialist, totalitarian, ... "ventures" for large multinational corporations, etcetera, and I've read from good analysts about NGOs too often being very, very corrupt, sometimes wholly so. Well, NGOs and also "humanitarian" organisations of govts, such as USAID, f.e. That the U.S. State Dept is and has too long been extremely corrupt and hypocritical has been obvious, but in terms of adopting the NGO "format" wasn't something that had specifically come to my mind. I just knew that it was extremely hypocritical, a lying "machine", ....
That the World Bank has been and is very corrupt, etcetera, has been obvious enough for quite ... many years, except that I didn't know of the details in this reality. I've acquired some of that knowledge over the past several years, and when we do, then the obvious becomes more strongly that, and with very incriminating [details].
U.S. State Dept, USAID, the NED, etcetera, all extremely corrupt and hypocritcal.
And the U.S. dominates the awfully too weak UNSC, using it as a convenient instrument in diabolical ways. When they make reality such that directors of the UNHRC or UNHCR, whatever the humanitarian council or part is called, [resign] due to being constantly denied what they call for, for real humanitarian action, and as happened with I believe two such directors who opposed the genocidal sanctions against Iraq, 1991-2003, then we have no doubt that the UNSC folds to the whims of the fiends ruling the U.S. superpower (behind closed doors, with their puppets on front stage, "of course"). When we know that the UNSC has drafted well over 20 resolutions for the purpose of getting hell-on-earth Israeli govt (with the U.S. "secretly" involved, to say the least) to cease its hellishly extreme crimes against Palestinians, f.e., then we have only more concrete proof that the U.S. dominates the UNSC.
So perhaps it's appropriate to include the UNSC along with the U.S. State Dept, ..., World Bank, and other large, powerful, and extremely corrupt institutions; and multinational corporations.
I suppose Nichols Guilhot would, might anyway, speak differently about the UNSC, but doubt that he would say that its a 'success' in any good sense. Details about it would differ, but I see it as part of the rest of this group of [fiends].