Porcupine Tangos: The PA and the NGOs

(Accompanied by the CIA Orchestra)

by Roni Ben Efrat

IF the Palestinian national movement had achieved an independent state in the Occupied Territories, its larger non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the fields of health and agriculture would each have formed the basis for a corresponding ministry. "When we were young," says Muhammad Jaradat, a founder of the NGO, BADIL 1 , "we dreamed we were laying the foundation for a state. When we started the agricultural union, we thought we would merge one day with other farmers' organizations to form the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture." (Interview with Challenge, August 11, 1999.)
In the event of statehood, the smaller NGOs could have remained independent, guaranteeing a pluralistic society, trying alternative approaches to problems, working in the community, supporting groups neglected by the state, serving as a watchdog for democracy and human rights.
This process, of course, did not take place. The Oslo accords have left the national question unresolved. Oslo's creature, the Palestinian Authority (PA), does not provide the kind of leadership that can build a viable state. Its chairperson insists on running everything. Its ministries are dysfunctional. Corruption sops up much of its money.

Covering for the PA

In view of the PA's faults, we can understand why the larger NGOs have avoided merging with the corresponding government ministries, preferring to guard whatever independence they have. This state of affairs occasionally reaches the point of absurdity. There are NGOs whose budgets are bigger than those of the corresponding PA departments. I have it from many sources that the Ministry of Agriculture seeks help on occasion from PARC (Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees). Or consider the field of health: Last year the PA's supply of medicines in Ramallah dwindled to nothing. The government hospitals simply had none. Several NGOs came to the (partial) rescue. Among them was ANERA, a large American NGO based in the Territories. It contributed $3.5 million worth of drugs. ANERA obtains its medicines, by the way, from US drug companies that have to get rid of their surpluses in order to receive new supplies. In such a case, there is no guarantee that the contributed medicines match the hospitals' needs.2
What do we learn from this story? For one thing, we learn that the NGOs, while preserving their independence and even increasing their power, may easily wind up, willy-nilly, serving as a cover for the weakness of PA ministries. In a truly democratic society, a government that fails to function is replaced. If its members steal public money, leaving insufficient funds to provide minimal services, one would expect an opposition to rise and unseat them. In the case of the PA, it is fair to assume that much public money gets funneled into the pockets of certain ministers, since most of those who were accused in an official report three years ago remain in power.3
Yet no opposition arises. Why not? – Whence could it arise, if not from among the opponents of Oslo? And where are they? Not in the political parties – these have surrendered. The opponents of Oslo have gone into the NGOs! But an NGO cannot do the work of a political party in opposition. The reason is simple: each NGO has a built-in weakness. It can function only as part of a pair: funder and recipient.
Because most funders today have no interest in rocking the PA's boat, the NGOs must toe Yasser Arafat's line, accepting "distortions" in democracy, thus contributing to a system of dual power and dual responsibility in the provision of services. Those who join the NGOs are neutralized politically. We have, then, a paradox: NGOs may do excellent work in specific areas – there is no doubt they help many people; but without opposition parties to back them, the broader effect of their mere existence is to inhibit change.

There is a further problem. To whom are NGO workers accountable? To their funders – not to a popular constituency. No one elects them. They may do their best to provide services, but if these do not suffice – if the toys do not get to the day-care centers or the medicines to the clinics or the water to the faucets – who from among the local populace can come to them with complaints?
For the Palestinian people, the upshot is this: Shunted back and forth between the PA and the NGOs, it fails to get the minimal services that belong to it by right.
What is more, in the days of direct Occupation, there was no lack of clarity about where to direct criticism: the responsibility lay upon Israel. The struggle for rights took place both on the political level and on the level of the people, who were organized by the parties into popular movements and NGOs. Today, however, the NGOs must dance in tune with the PA. Since the latter has abandoned the struggle for liberation, NGO work no longer has national significance. Apart from plugging up gaps and solving individual problems, there is little left for their members to do but grimly endure the relatively stable lifestyle – and perks – of the elite group to which they belong.

What should be the agenda of the NGOs?

In a capitalist society, which crushes the weak and suppresses opposition, the NGOs should be the bearers of a humanistic, universal vision – solidarity with the weak is basic to their "reason for being". They cannot, for example, support the process of globalization, which the United States promotes today in its function as chief financial and military policeman to the world.
Ideally, the recipient NGO consists of community-minded people who want to lift their group from backwardness to development. In the third world, however, given the lack of governmental funding, the NGO depends totally on foreign donors. The latter may well have their own agendas, which need not tally with that of the NGO. In such a case the NGO will be tempted to adjust its agenda.
Ideally, the NGO funder collects money from its community. The churches, for example, have usually managed to keep their agendas responsive to recipients' needs. The appeal to a first-world community (whether religious or secular), on behalf of a third-world one, fits the basic concept of the NGO, namely, to build solidarity between the strong and the weak.
Many funders, however, depend on their governments for money, and they often face daunting political problems. (In the Palestinian case, the European governments have struck from their lists all opponents of the Oslo process.) European NGOs that identify ideologically with the local opposition in the Third World are often unable to help. Little by little, the funding-NGOs are becoming mere emissaries of their governments, staffed by careerists for whom a couple of years in Asia or Africa make a nice addition to the curriculum vitae.

The NGOs before Oslo

Toward the end of the seventies, in addition to military and political mobilization, people organized quite openly in the Territories with the aim of improving the life of the masses under Occupation. The political parties established popular movements of women, students and workers. There was a great deal of redundancy, reflecting the various ideologies within Palestinian society: five women's organizations, five general unions, etc. Despite much duplication of effort, the amount of communal activity was enormous, reconciling the goal of independence with grass-roots work. These groups functioned in utter independence from the Israeli military regime, which saw them as a threat. Hardly a single leader of the popular movements managed to avoid imprisonment. Many were deported. Before the intifada, they constituted the social infrastructure that organized the people and managed to maintain the civil rebellion nearly three years running.
These popular movements became the basis for the NGOs. The people needed an infrastructure in fields such as health, agriculture, industry and education. By nature, such matters require professional workers. The popular committees, therefore – each with its distinct ideology – spawned organizations that focused on providing professional services.
Not all did so. Fatah, for example, the largest mass organization in the Territories, did not succeed in establishing efficient NGOs. By contrast, the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP), while keeping aloof from armed struggle, distinguished itself by founding extremely effective professional organizations. Its contacts with Communist parties abroad enabled it to come up with the necessary starting funds. Given its efficiency, the PCP was then able to achieve dominance in the fields of health and agriculture. (See below.)
The Popular Front also worked in these fields. The Democratic Front, famous for its women's organizations, established a broad network of day-care centers in the villages and refugee camps.
These pre-Oslo NGOs were never separate entities. Projects were sometimes staffed more by political activists than by professionals, in which case the quality of the services might decline. It also happened, on occasion, that funds which had been collected for the sake of a project went instead to the needs of the political movement. Yet the NGOs of that era had a singular advantage: the services they provided contributed to a common purpose.
The funders, too, generally shared that purpose. They gave their help from the side, taking care not to confuse support with interference.

The NGOs Post-Oslo: The Recipients

The Madrid Conference, followed by Oslo, shook up the entire apparatus that had developed in the previous decades. The political organizations and their NGOs had understood themselves to be building the infrastructure of a future Palestinian state. But Arafat shunted them to the side, swept away the national program that had united millions, and chose instead to reach a secret agreement with Israel.
With the partial exception of Hamas, the political structure inside the Territories collapsed, both ideologically and organizationally. The Palestinian program, which called for a state within the 1967 borders as well as the refugees' right of return, was suddenly bereft of advocates. The leaders of the Left fell silent.
Little by little, however – amid the frenzy of the Oslo enthusiasts and the paralysis of its opponents – the stronger and wealthier among the old NGOs re-emerged, and beside them sprung up hundreds of new ones. They did not take orders, as in the old days, from corresponding political organizations, but rather from new bosses: the donor nations, the World Bank, and the CIA – by way of its local agency, USAID (see below). Yet, lo and behold, among the NGO chiefs appeared familiar faces from a different context: people who, in the past, had been leaders of students, workers, and women in the national movement. Lacking professional opportunities within the PA, many of the intelligentsia were attracted to the NGOs, which have a bigger employment-potential. The former political leaders found themselves sans national program, sans masses – but with their own economic futures to worry about.

Temptation
Where a political vacuum exists, corruption rushes in to fill it. Where a society loses its goal, the collective conscience flounders. Where once that conscience determined individual norms, now each is on his or her own. In such a situation, even the society's erstwhile pillars can fall. The following account, which is not untypical, was reported to me by D., himself a prominent NGO leader:
"N. was a friend of mine for many years. We sat in prison together. I got out a little before him. He was among the top leaders of the intifada and the Popular Front. Soon after his release, he came to me and said, "Look, I'm really in a bad way. I can't even pay the rent." The Popular Front couldn't help him, you see: it had rejected Madrid and Oslo, Arafat had closed off its sources of funding, and it was really hard up. I was working at the time for an NGO press office, and I was able to get him a part-time job, as well as little jobs on the side, so he'd be able to support himself and also be free for party work. Well, one day he suddenly came up to me like a kid with a new toy. He'd given a political lecture to a group from abroad and been paid $100. I said, "Look, because you did it during office hours, the money should go to the office." Well, he turned it over, but that was the beginning. A little while later – this was in 1995 or 1996 – he told us he'd been invited to the States to give a series of lectures, and he asked for an immediate month-long leave of absence. We told him he couldn't just take off without more advance notice. He decided to go anyway. We thought he was going to speak with solidarity groups and gain support for the party. In our darkest nightmares we never imagined he'd go as the guest of the National Democratic Institute in Washington. The NDI gets 17% of its budget from the CIA. And what do they do there? They take people and brainwash them, teach them to revere America and its democracy. Well, sure enough, the guy comes back, and just around that time some of our cadres pulled off an action against settlers. What does N. do? He publishes a press condemnation of the action and signs it as a leader of the Popular Front! This guy was once the pride of the movement. Today he works in an NGO and gives lectures about 'civil society'."

According to the best estimates I can find, there are about 1200 Palestinian NGOs, if we include about 500 old, established charitable institutions that have never had political connections. The remaining 700 are those we are interested in here. They include the uprooted offspring of the old political parties, as well as the many new ones that sprung up out of the soil imported from Oslo. If we make the conservative assumption that these 700 employ, on average, fifteen persons each (not counting the thousands who work in health-service NGOs, such as Muqassad Hospital), we arrive at the figure of 10,500. That is, at least this many men and women receive their salaries from foreign governments, bodies and agencies. These salaries are bigger than those of people working in the PA offices or even in the security services. I did a small, informal survey among workers in NGOs. Concerning senior administrators, the figures I heard from various sources ranged between $2000 and $4000 per month. (In Israel, by comparison – where the minimum wage is $800 monthly – that would be a generous income for a worker in the private sector.)
"In fact," says Muhammad Jaradat, "the official salary is bigger than it looks, because it does not include the perks – such as telephone costs, life insurance, pension, car maintenance, administrative costs (a conveniently vague category – RBE), per diem expenses, and hospitality. Under the rubric of hospitality, for example, a well-known NGO administrator from Ramallah occasionally invites his entire staff to the famous Saturday lunch buffet at the American Colony Hotel. (At $32 per person, this is considered an "in" thing to do among the Israeli bourgeoisie. – RBE) I heard about this from one of the workers in that organization, who quit because of the corruption. In contrast with the top salary, the secretary will often earn $300 - $400 monthly, about a tenth of what her boss does."
The normal salaries of workers in the field amount to between $800 and $1000 per month. That is about $500 more than what a worker in the PA's public sector earns. A Palestinian teacher, for example, earns between $400 and $600.
Mustafa Barghouti heads The Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees – Medical Relief, for short. Originally connected to the PCP, it was the pioneering medical NGO in the Territories. Today it is considered by many to be the biggest and most efficient health-service organization there. In a telephone interview with Challenge, Barghouti gave the following figures: The annual budget of Medical Relief is about $2.5 million. It maintains 26 clinics, which employ a total of 200 persons. (There are 1800 volunteers.) The highest monthly salary is $2000, the lowest $250, and the average, $800. If we accept the accuracy of these figures, simple arithmetic shows that about 80% of the budget goes to salaries. Medical Relief must be very efficient indeed!

Given the smallness of the private sector in the Territories, the NGO community is the natural one to which every university graduate will aspire. Within the last six years, an elite has been formed that presides over millions of dollars. This community does indeed provide services to the people, and often on a higher level than the PA. Its members live a relatively comfortable life. Given the lack of a national agenda, it is in their self-interest to preserve the status quo. That means, above all, to fulfil the expectations of those who butter their bread.
Yet the NGO "empire" has a soft underbelly. Its organizations depend wholly on the whims of foreign funders, whose agenda may change from time to time. Jean-Christophe Gerard represents Terres Des Hommes in the Territories and serves as coordinator of AIDA (The Association of International Development Agencies). He gave me the following example:

"ECHO (The Emergency Fund of the European Community) funds European NGOs. "Pharmacies Sans Frontieres" (PSF) received ECHO funds in order to supply hundred of clinics with free medicines, which it bought from local manufacturers. This worked well. The production was local, yet PSF made sure the drugs met its standards, and the poor were the beneficiaries. Now all of a sudden, ECHO has decided, from one day to the next, not to fund PSF anymore. The trouble is, the vast majority of the small NGO clinics, some 90% of them, had not included the item "medicines" in their budgets, because they assumed they would continue to receive them gratis through PSF. You can imagine what will happen to these clinics in the next six months! The Emergency Fund has created an emergency indeed!
"What happened here? Well, ECHO said that the medicines were no longer a priority. Now the Bedouin and the water supply are suddenly more important. Likewise, disability stopped being a priority – except, of course, for the disabled. As for the Americans, their funding-NGOs change policies every year. CARE and Save the Children have to follow the directives of USAID, whose sands are constantly shifting."

The NGOs Post-Oslo: The Funders – especially USAID

The nature of the funders too has changed since Oslo. It would be an injustice, however, to put them all in the same basket. Many funders, especially the older ones, continue to devote themselves fully and purely to their work. Here, again, is Jaradat:
"There are good and bad donors. The good are those who support an ideology, an aim. They follow the work because they're really interested. These are very few. Among them I would definitely include solidarity organizations and churches. A few thousand dollars from them are more important to me than hundreds of thousands from agencies with the American mentality (which don't have to be American to have it), because at least I am working with people who understand and value my work and vice-versa. Most of all, they aren't bullshitted by Oslo. They have a clear vision, and they don't hesitate to continue the program under pressure."
In general, however, the character of the funders has changed since Oslo. Whereas the agenda used to be dictated by the needs of the people – the need for a clinic or day-care center, the need for a cooperative or some other form of empowerment – most contributions nowadays come as a result of policy decisions by governments, foreign agencies, and the European Union. The money arrives in bundles of at least $150,000 per project. The spearhead of this change was The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which entered the Palestinian arena in 1994. It is accepted as common knowledge throughout the third world that USAID is the "humanitarian" arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The ink was not dry on the Oslo accord, when the US announced a contribution of $500 million, to be distributed in the Territories over a five-year period. 4 In August 1994 USAID got the job of giving out $375 million of this money. (The rest has been handled by OPIC: The Overseas Private Investment Corporation.) According to the USAID web page (www.info.usaid.gov),"In 1996 the USAID West Bank and Gaza Mission designed a five-year democracy and governing strategy to promote the growth of a stable and democratic Palestinian society." Later in the document we learn how the CIA plans to use the NGOs that it supports in order to infiltrate the PA's decision-making process:
"USAID and its partners have engaged the Palestinian Authority on the need for an NGO law which enables Palestinian NGOs and other civil society organizations to play an active role in the decision-making process.... (A) number of civil society organizations, including several who are receiving grants from USAID, lobbied the Palestinian Legislative Council successfully to make changes in the draft NGO law which were supportive of NGO operations." (Ibid. My italics. – RBE.)
If USAID had established the global reputation of, say, Amnesty International, who would think to raise an eyebrow? But alas, it is not so. On the one hand, the Americans have shown a remarkable interest in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), as well as in the NGOs. On the other hand, as a result of the negotiations at Wye Plantation, the CIA itself works cheek and jowl with the PA security apparatus. Wholly dependent on the Americans, Arafat appears to be admitting them both through the front door and through the back.

Before Oslo, the term USAID was a bugbear in Palestinian circles. Any money that could be linked to the CIA was taboo. Today, however, in an atmosphere of defeat and aimlessness, there are no red lines. Only frame your project under the rubric "Civil Society", "Democracy", "Joint Ventures", or "Seeds of Peace" and win a million dollars. Jaradat: "In so-called 'joint ventures' you'll find, say, a dozen Palestinians and a token Israeli or two. What are the Israelis doing there, I wonder? Before Oslo we had real cooperation, and the Israeli members worked in solidarity with us. Nowadays it's not solidarity – it's 'normalization': to impose the Oslo agreement on us and say it's OK. Bantustans – OK. Closure – OK. Bypass roads – OK. Settlements – OK."
The term "civil society" accompanies USAID like Mary's little lamb. This amorphous, ubiquitous, apparently innocuous term appears to put things into a kind of focus, whereas its real function is to put other things out of focus. "In general," writes Ahmad Nimer in Green Left Weekly (March 25, 1998), p. 16, "civil society is taken to be that part of society between the level of the state and the individual. It has been used to encompass a wide variety of institutions such as unions, youth groups, women's organizations, educational and religious formations, businesses and even sporting clubs." As to what the term throws out of focus: "...(C)ritics point out that civil society itself is rife with class contradictions, and democracy can't be separated from which class has state power. ...The civil society approach ignores the reality of class-divided societies. It obscures the real nature of democracy and treats it as a principled, de-classed set of political and social rights...."
Nimer continues, "...Many of these (the NGOs) advocate strengthening democracy and building civil society. In practice this has led to the de-politicization of Palestinian society, replacing the role of mass struggle with professional bodies that seek funds to hold workshops and conduct training courses and conferences, to advocate rather than mobilize."
The concept of civil society fosters the illusion that individual initiatives determine reality. In fact things run in accordance with ideological programs backed by armed force, such as the free market (the US), or Zionism (Israel), or the mere perpetuation of a ruling elite (the PA). Under "civil society", only the Palestinian masses remain without a program.

Of the $193 million that USAID contributed to the Territories between 1996 and 1998, it gave $27 million (14%) for "Governance". This category, we learn from the agency's website, includes "town hall meetings, civic education sessions, open fora to publicize and review draft laws... Some programs provide funding for different types of training activities such as training for grass roots women community leaders and an intensive training for civil society leaders..." Who are all these potential leaders? Housewives? Farmers? Unskilled workers? Hardly. They are members of NGOs. Here is a kind of incestuous NGOing – "You come to my workshop, I'll come to yours – Bring a camera!" And what are the workshops for? – To train one another in focusing on certain kinds of things at the expense of other kinds of things (class differences) that might upset the existing order. Here we see America promoting old-fashioned New-England-style town-hall democracy upstairs, while down in the basement, out of hearing, its CIA helps Arafat turn the screws to suppress opposition.
Returning to the $193 million that USAID contributed between 1996 and 1998: a full $116 million went to projects for improving the water supply. At first glance that would seem laudable. The Palestinians are desperately short. Their situation would be vastly improved, however, if Israel did not take the water that should be theirs. (See Challenge # 34 . Also, more recently, Amira Hass in Ha'aretz, June 21, 1999.) The fact is, Israel too is desperate for water, though it has far more per capita than the Palestinians in the Territories. Often, in this region, nefarious motives come clothed in "good deeds". In the case of water, too, that may be the case: Are the Americans spending so much to improve the Palestinian supply in order to relieve the pressure on Israel to make concessions?

USAID and Wye
Ever since the Wye Memorandum, the US and the PA have worried that without swift and visible progress, the Oslo agreement might collapse. Here again it's USAID to the rescue! The agency decided to pinpoint projects that would bear quick results. (That is, America's pro-Oslo policy took precedence over local needs.) Tom Delaney of its Community Services Program invited several NGOs to a meeting in Tel Aviv on June 18. (Source: <www.usaid-wbg.org/cspsum.htm>.) Among them were representatives of American organizations such as Save the Children, CARE, AMIDEAST, ANERA, WORLD VISION, and USAID itself. But also present were members of the largest Palestinian agricultural NGO, PARC.
The topic of the meeting in Tel Aviv was $15 million, available for immediate distribution under the Community Services Program – no "cost sharing" required. (In contrast, most European funders, including the European Economic Community [EEC], insist that the recipient invest money or human resources of its own in a project.) Delaney spelled out the need for proposals "which will provide services at the community level in a relatively short period of time." Another telling detail: USAID prefers giving multiple grants to a few large NGOs for a period of two to four years, each grant "having a minimum total value of $3 million. This is a strict minimum, as the Mission has no resources to award and manage a large number of small grants." (Ibid.) No resources? Perhaps. But when the number of recipients is small and the sums of money large, it is also easier to exert control.

There is a tremendous difference, of course, between the European donor nations and USAID. The former exercise a measure of self-restraint in the imposition of agendas. Lately, however, their contributions have dwindled. Nor does the EEC release money in the amounts or with the frequency it used to. The US, meanwhile, has worked on transforming the PA areas into its own zone of influence. USAID chooses its partners carefully. It cleaves to its purpose. The needs of the people – except in the dubious case of water – find no expression in the agency's position papers. Their jargon is the typical ketchup of the plastic US regime. The agency's involvement is bound up with the Oslo agreement, and the megabucks have a single purpose: to make Oslo work.
For all their importance to USAID, the NGOs are secondary to its other concerns, namely the expansion of free trade and the private sector – matters into which I cannot enter here. When we search more deeply, however, into what it may want from the NGOs, we find a curious two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, the agency demands that they cooperate with the PA. In practice, on the other hand, the agency singles out and cultivates those NGOs that are directly connected to it, as if it were interested in developing a separate, parallel governing authority.
I heard the following account from a senior representative of a major European NGO in the Territories:

"Here is an example showing how USAID works to smash an existing governmental health-care institution. In many remote areas, the women give birth without ever seeing a gynecologist. Therefore, Medecins Sans Frontieres has been working at a PA hospital in Hebron, training primary-health-care workers. They learn how to detect potential problems and when they do, they send the women to a high-risk clinic in Hebron. Admittedly, it's not 100% efficient, and the workers aren't paid enough, but lately another NGO has invested in renovating this PA clinic.
"Now we hear that USAID intends to give millions of dollars for prenatal care to the People's Friend Society and to Medical Relief. Please understand: NGO health care is expensive; people have to pay. So while USAID preaches against redundancy, the effect of this grant will be to break down the PA's health-care sector. In two or three years there will be two parallel systems: a poor-quality PA system for those who cannot afford to pay and the NGO system, with a more advanced and expensive infrastructure.
"I don't know what they're trying to do. Is the aim to create, in the long run, a private sector? It is common knowledge, moreover, that people who work in the pre-natal field get to influence the women with regard to birth control – and we know how worried Israel is about natural increase in the Territories." 5

Following up on the account of the European representative, I asked Mustafa Barghouti, head of Medical Relief, whether his organization seeks support from USAID. "We have a decision to work only with NGOs," he answered. [USAID is not an NGO, rather a government agency.] I pointed out that many American NGOs get their money chiefly from USAID. Barghouti confirmed that Medical Relief is negotiating with CARE. This NGO, a participant in the recent Tel Aviv meeting, receives much of its money from USAID.
The European representative who had talked about pre-natal care went on to say: "I've been doing development work for almost two decades, and I have to report, in all sadness, that the foreign NGOs are becoming a partner in the global system. Fifteen years ago they knew enough to stay clear of the official political scene. They helped the people and no one heard about them. Today, when you listen to the news, you hear the term NGO every day. The Americans used to say, 'Send the marines!' Now it might as well be, 'Send the NGOs!' They get where America wants to go before the marines. When the armies land, the NGOs are there to supply them with information."

Washington is well aware of the PA's weakness. As in many places throughout the third world, it is attempting to cultivate and corrupt a social stratum that will be ready, if and when the moment comes, to replace the existing government. The community of the NGOs has reached a point of decision. It must decide what to implement, the American agenda or the program of the Palestinian people.
As for the little lamb "civil society", the NGOs will do well to remember, as they stand before this decision, that there was nothing uncivil about Palestinian society during the three lionlike years of the intifada. Mutual solidarity and communal organization provided a model of civil society such as the world has rarely seen. An entire population organized itself around a single vision, which was implemented through the NGOs of yore.
But let there be no confusion: first came the chicken (the political parties), then the egg (the NGOs)! In those glory days, the moving forces behind the NGOs were the national vision, the parties and their programs – not the money!

PA Pressure on the NGOs

The PA is not blind to the fact that USAID is cultivating the NGOs. It is also concerned that the latter, with their foreign connections, constitute a potentially powerful lobby. Until now the occasional conflicts between the NGO community and the Authority have stopped short of open warfare. Side by side, they nonetheless try to keep their distance, like porcupines in a tango.
During the last few years, the NGO community has been in intensive contact with the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) concerning the formulation of the "NGO" law, which was initiated, we recall, by USAID. This is the law, mentioned above, that would enable the NGOs "to play an active role in the decision-making process." It would also regulate their registration and areas of responsibility.
Arafat was not about to sit on his hands while USAID came in the front door. He wanted the NGOs to be registered under the Interior Ministry. (This is the norm through most of the world.) The NGOs resisted, since Interior is directly connected to Arafat and his security arms. They would have preferred the Ministry of Justice. The debate went on for months, and finally Arafat got his way.
I asked Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group about the issue of registration. He answered that it didn't really matter where they put the NGOs. Arafat has his hands in every department. "From my point of view, I don't mind registering in the Ministry of Agriculture – it wouldn't make any difference." Muhammad Jaradat agrees: "It's all cosmetics. Even if the NGOs were to get their way and register with the Justice Ministry, they'd need a 'certificate of good behavior' from Interior, meaning: the security apparatus."

It is curious that the NGOs sought refuge from Arafat under the wing of the Justice Ministry. His interference there is pervasive and blatant. Court decisions are implemented or not at his whim. Several NGOs that focus on human rights have long criticized the PA on this point, and UNSCO recently came out with a report adopting their views. The PA Minister of Justice, of all people, lashed back, accusing the NGOs of corruption. These tensions have led the Arafat regime to establish a new PA "Ministry of NGO Affairs" (MONGO), headed by Oslo "architect" Hassan Asfour. In a recent meeting with AIDA representatives, including Jean-Christophe Gerard of Terres des Hommes, Asfour affirmed that the work of the NGOs was welcome, but advised them "not to dabble in politics."
Judging from precedents in Vietnam and Rwanda, Gerard points out that the result of the new ministry is likely to be a cut in NGO budgets. The PA has been influenced here, he told me, by a longstanding dispute in Egypt between the government and the NGOs:
"In Egypt they demand that any money coming into the country must first be approved by the government. If that is going to be the situation here, then the NGOs will lose their independence. They'll be under a kind of financial control that amounts to the same as political control. The government will decide which NGOs get money and which do not."

At the beginning of this article I sketched a chronological sequence: the Oslo agreement was signed, the political parties inside the Territories collapsed, and many of the agreement's potential opponents found work in the NGOs, where – dependent on outside funders – they were politically neutralized. In the absence of opposition parties, the NGOs have no bulwark between themselves and Arafat.
The Palestinian people may one day have to ask itself whether, despite all the good works, the NGOs have not, in the end, proved detrimental.

Today, when the Palestinian opposition has been broken to pieces, and the pieces have been absorbed by both the PA and the NGOs, the latter amount to no more than aspirin – whereas the people needs a heart transplant! It needs a new heart that will give an answer to the unemployed workers imprisoned in Bantustans, to the farmers whose lands have been taken, to the refugees who need to come home.

The order of the day is this: Build an opposition to the PA! And the NGOs? Their role? If any? The time has come for soul-searching.

Endnotes

1. The BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights is based in Bethlehem.

2. I have this account from an American NGO worker who, like many of the sources for this article, wishes to remain anonymous.

3. PLC Report on the Findings of the General Control Office, August 9, 1997, pp. 17-21, summarized in Challenge # 45, pp. 5-6.

4. The Mouse That Roared syndrome. American money has a habit of arriving after the would-be beneficiary has surrendered. On April 18, Ibrahim Alloush of the Free Arab Voice (www.fav.net) published a "top secret" document from the CIA's Balkan Institute with the title, "Promoting Democracy in Yugoslavia". The agency recommended that its government increase the 1998 budget for this worthy purpose from $15 million to $35 million. Several of the line items are interesting. $10 million is to go to the media, whose job will be to emphasize instances of repression. The NGOs will get $5 million. Another $10 million will go to political parties, especially those that cooperate with the NGOs.

5. The words about pre-natal care receive a degree of confirmation from the USAID website. Since 1996, it states, the agency has focused on "private sector growth, water resources, and democracy/governance. In addition, in 1999, USAID will add activities in two areas of special concern: maternal/child health and community services." (Op. cit.)