US conservatives take aim at NGOs - Currents - Brief Article

NGOs are using their growing prominence and power to pursue a 'liberal' agenda at the international level that threatens US sovereignty and free-market capitalism.

That was the message delivered by a series of speakers at an all-day conference, 'Nongovernmental Organizations: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few,' in June 2003 sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington thinktank that has been particularly influential with the Bush Administration.

'NGOs have created their own rules and regulations and demanded that governments and corporations abide by those rules,' according to AEI and the conference co-sponsor, the rightist Institute of Public Affairs [IPA) of Australia. 'Politicians and corporate leaders are often forced to respond to the NGO media machine, and the resources of taxpayers and shareholders are used in support of ends they did not sanction.'

'The extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies, as well as the effectiveness of credible NGOs,' they warned.

To shed more light on NGOs, AEI announced the launch of a new website, NGOWatch.org (www.ngowatch.org), that will provide information about their operations, funding sources and political agendas.

'This is inherently a project that is tilted to the Left,' according to Cornell University professor Jeremy Rabkin, who argued that NGOs are using the multilateral system to try to regulate corporations and governments.

International NGOs are pursuing a 'liberal internationalist' vision that 'wants to constrain the United States' according to American University professor Kenneth Anderson.

IPA executive director Mike Nahan charged that international NGOs supported secession movements in East Timer and Aceh, Indonesia; put Papua New Guinea 'on the road to bankruptcy' by forcing out the mining industry; and were 'destroying civil society in many of these countries'.

Jim Lobe, OneWorld US

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