Arundhati Roy Explains NGOs to You

Say the acronym "NGO" and most people say "Huh?" Then you have to explain to the uninitiated what exactly an NGO is, which produces the same sort of confusing noise you would have received from people in the fourth century debating the precise nature of the Trinity. The online Free Dictionary has a brief general definition, then some examples which betray an oddly specific interest in Pakistan. I quote:

"NGO: an organization that is not part of the local or state or federal government, nongovernmental organization, a group of people who work together:

--Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, an international organization that provides a support group for persons trying to overcome alcoholism

--Greenpeace, an international organization that works for environmental conservation and the preservation of endangered species

--Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad, MDI, a Sunni organization formed in 1989 and based in Pakistan; opposes missionary groups from the United States; has Lashkar-e-Tayyiba as its armed wing

--Red Cross, an international organization that cares for the sick or wounded or homeless in wartime

--Salvation Army, a charitable and religious organization to evangelize and to care for the poor and homeless

--Umma Tameer-e-Nau, UTN, a nongovernmental organization of Pakistani scientists that has been a supporter of terrorism; has provided information about chemical and biological and nuclear warfare to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and the Taliban."

As very correctly stigmatized by Arundhati Roy, the NGOs that concern us are semi-official groups, usually dependent on grants from governments or cautious and orthodox private foundations. Their general relationship to mass protest and vigorous movements for social change is sedative, conservative, and ultimately lethal. Take the efforts to curb the rampages of the World Bank, an outfit that should be destroyed, with its senior officials reassigned to useful tasks at the lower levels of the recycling industry. In the end the directors of the World Bank had the bright idea of simply importing the bank's fiercest critics and setting them to work in the World Bank where the zeal for reform in their bosoms soon subsided to a decorous smolder, then vanished altogether as they mutated into compliant functionaries spouting the nonsense they had spent their previous existence deriding.

At one point in a long and very interesting talk she gave in San Francisco on August 16, Ms. Roy raised a cautionary finger about the evolution of the World Social Forum:

"In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, film makers--some of the best minds in the world--came together to share their experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire. That was the birth of the now historic World Social Forum. It was the first, formal coming together of an exciting, anarchic, un-indoctrinated, energetic, new kind of 'Public Power.' The rallying cry of the WSF is 'Another World is Possible.' It has become a platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and seminars have helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should be.

"By January 2004, when the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it attracted 200,000 delegates. I have never been part of a more electrifying gathering. It was a sign of the social forum's success that the mainstream media in India ignored it completely. But now, the WSF is threatened by its own success. The safe, open, festive atmosphere of the forum has allowed politicians and nongovernmental organizations that are implicated in the political and economic systems that the forum opposes to participate and make themselves heard.

"Another danger is that the WSF, which has played such a vital role in the movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an end unto itself. Just organizing it every year consumes the energies of some of the best activists. If conversations about resistance replace real civil disobedience, then the WSF could become an asset to those whom it was created to oppose. The forum must be held and must grow, but we have to find ways to channel our conversations there back into concrete action."

Then, a little later, Roy returned to the topic of what she calls "the NGO-ization of Resistance":

"It will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar, they are given as dowry), of course there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.

"In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to neo-liberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, agriculture, energy, transport, and public health. As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in public spending. Most large, funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the UN, and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees the neo-liberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place.

"Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right.

"They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar [the government]and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators.

"In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species. It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the US preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation.

"In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework more or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political context.

"Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese...in need of the white man's help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and re-affirm the achievements, the comforts, and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilization. They're the secular missionaries of the modern world.

"Eventually--on a smaller scale but more insidiously--the capital available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation into negotiation. It de-politicizes resistance. It interferes with local peoples' movements that have traditionally been self-reliant. NGOs have funds that can employ local people who might otherwise be activists in resistance movements, but now can feel they are doing some immediate, creative good (and earning a living while they're at it). Real political resistance offers no such short cuts.

"The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary."

This is the best dissection of the political function of NGOs I've ever read. Next time you see someone like Vivanco of Human Rights Watch rushing to Caracas, as he did earlier this summer, to assist in efforts to turn out Chavez, consult Ms. Roy on NGOs for the fundamental reasons.