Their arrival reflects rising local prices and cultural shock. Many of them live in luxury homes, or five-star hotels, driving SUVs, $3000 sports laptops and PDA. They earn twice the amount of average local income. They are busy people, preachers, critics, evildoers, and devotees.
They are always self-motivated, they respond to no region. Although unelected and ignorant of local facts, they deal with democratically elected and elected officials. A few of them are full of crime and corruption. They are non-governmental organizations, or NGOs.
Other NGOs - such as Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Medicines Sans Frontiers, or Amnesty - have a real role to play in improving welfare, reducing hunger, promoting human and social rights, or preventing disease. Others - often forming intellectual and hospitality groups - are sometimes biased, or religiously committed and, more often, work for special interests.
NGOs - such as the International Crisis Group - have openly joined on behalf of opposition parties in the last parliamentary elections in Macedonia. Other NGOs have done so in Belarus and Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Israel, in Nigeria and Thailand, Slovakia and Hungary - even in Western, rich countries, including the USA, Canada, Germany, and Belgium.
Violations of international jurisdiction - contained in many treaties and treaties - allow NGOs to participate so far in domestic issues such as corruption, civil rights, media formation, punitive and community codes, environmental policies, or redistribution. Of economic and natural resources, such as land and water. No sector of public works is now liberated from the light of NGOs. They act as their own chosen witnesses, judges, judges and murderers gathered together.
No matter how attractive they are or how they work, all NGOs are very complex with well-established, well-paid, over-operated offices. Opacity is common in NGOs. Amnesty's laws prohibit its officials from talking publicly about the organization internal work - proposals, debates, opinions - until it has been formally voted on in its Message.
Thus, conflicting ideas rarely get public hearings. Contrary to their teachings, the funding of NGOs remains elusive and their sponsors unknown. The total revenue of many non-governmental organizations, even the largest ones, comes from - usually from outside power.
Many NGOs act as official contractors for government. NGOs act as the long arms of their sponsoring provinces - collecting intelligence, burning their image, and promoting their interests. There is a revolving door between private sector employees and government officials around the world.
The British Foreign Office is funding a number of non-governmental organizations - including Global "independent" - in troubled areas, such as Angola. Many host governments accuse NGOs - intentionally or unintentionally - of acting as hot spots for espionage. Very few NGOs receive some of their money from community grants and donations.
The largest NGOs spend one tenth of their budget on PR and asking for help. In an effort to attract international attention, many of them lied about their projects in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, reports "The Economist", in which the Red Cross felt compelled to make ten points for the NGO code of responsibility. The Code of Conduct was adopted in 1995.
But the situation reappeared in Kosovo. All NGO claims that it is not possible to make a profit - however, many of them have large equity portfolios and exploit their position to increase the market share of the firms they have. Conflicts of interest and misconduct abound. Direct is a British company dedicated to the “fair trade” of coffee.
Oxfam, an NGO, launched, three years ago, a campaign aimed at direct competitors, accusing them of exploiting farmers by paying them a small portion of the coffee sales they sell. However, Oxfam owns 25% of direct.
Large NGOs are similar to international companies in structure and function. They are the upper class, keeping large media, lobbying the government, and PR departments, head-scratching, investing in professional portfolios, competing for government tenders, and owning a variety of unrelated businesses.
The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development holds the second mobile phone user license in Afghanistan - among other businesses. In this case, NGOs like denominations rather than community organizations. Many NGOs promote economic causes - globalization, child labor restrictions, intellectual property rights, or the right to payment for agricultural products.
Many of these causes are valid and sound. Alas, many NGOs lack economic expertise and harm those who are accused of their profits. NGOs are sometimes used - or affiliated with - industry groups and political parties. It means that citizens of many developing countries suspect that Western countries and NGOs are promoting a trade protection agenda.
Strong - and expensive - labor and environmental provisions in international agreements may be a ploy to prevent imports based on cheap labor and competition from well-to-do local industries and their political leaders. Take child labor - as opposed to the worldwide condemnation of child prostitution, child labor, or child labor. Child labor, in many areas of poverty, is the only thing that separates the family from all that is full, life-threatening, and impoverished.
As the country's economy grows, child labor is declining. Following a complaint lodged, in 1995, by the NGO's against soccer matches organized by Pakistani children, both Nike and Reebok canceled their workshops and fired dozens of women and 7,000 children. The average family income - however small - dropped by 20 percent.
The incident prompted economists sills Brown, Alan Dear Doris, and Robert Stern to comment: “While Baden Sports can confidently say that their balls are not sewn by children, the removal of their production facility has undoubtedly done nothing for their oldest child. Workers and their families. ” This is far from being a unique case.
Threatened with legal retaliation and "name dangers" (name-calling and insults of extremist NGOs) - international organizations are participating in early expulsions. More than 50,000 children in Bangladesh were released in 1993 by the German clothing industry in anticipation of the United States Convention on Child Abstinence. Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, noted:
“Stopping child labor without doing anything else can leave children in a state of shock. If they work unnecessarily, as most of them do, hiring them may be forced into prostitution or another high-risk job. The most important thing is for them to be in school and to get an education that will help them to overcome poverty. ”
However, NGO-fostered hype, 70% of all children work within their families, in agriculture. Less than 1 percent are employed in mines and another 2 percent in construction. And unlike NGO-proffered panaceas, education is not the solution. Millions graduate each year from developing countries - 100,000 in Morocco alone. But unemployment reaches more than a third of the workforce in places like Macedonia.
Children at work may be cruelly mistreated by their supervisors but at least taken out of the most dangerous streets. Some children even end up being competent and given employment. The Economist summarizes the NGO's misunderstanding, irrationality, ignorance, and selfishness:
Legislation that requires them to pay higher wages is needed… NGOs, transformed international organizations and governments of rich countries enshrined strict rules on third-party factory wages, supported by trade restrictions to prevent imports from neighboring countries. Consumers in the West pay a lot - but voluntarily, because they know it's a good idea.
NGOs announce another victory. Companies, having already eliminated their third-party competition and defended their domestic markets, are counting their huge profits (despite higher wage costs). And third-rate workers from local industries explain to their children why a new Western treaty for victims of capitalism wants them to starve. ”
NGOs in areas such as Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Albania, and Zimbabwe have become the preferred destination for Western aid - both humanitarian and financial - for development funding, and emergency assistance. According to the Red Cross, more money goes to NGOs than to the World Bank.
Their iron grip on food, medicine, and finances gave them another government - sometimes littered with corpses and connected to the one they replaced. Local businessmen, politicians, academics, and even journalists are forming NGOs to get into a major Western crisis.
In doing so, they reward themselves and their relatives with Western salaries, benefits, and preferred access to Western goods and liabilities. NGOs have become major support networks in Africa, Latin America and Asia. NGOs happily chase disasters.
More than 200 of them opened shops in the wake of the 1999-2000 refugee crisis in Kosovo. Another 50 took their place during the civil war in Macedonia a year later. Floods, elections, earthquakes, wars - form a cornucopia that feeds NGOs. NGOs are advocates of Western values - women's lib, human rights, civil rights, child protection, freedom, equality.
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