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From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/14/2005 2:48 PM

Thursday, December 15, 2005

A Dual Dilemma for NGOs
By Georgy Bovt
Ella Pamfilova met with President Vladimir Putin in late November to stand up for nongovernmental organizations. Pamfilova, who heads the presidential Council for Fostering the Development of Civil Society, left the meeting greatly encouraged. "Our direct access to the president is a major resource," Pamfilova said.

This statement reflects the feeble state of most Russian NGOs. They are almost entirely dependent on the whims of those in power, and they are happy for any opportunity to bow down at their feet.

But should the true defenders of human rights and truly effective institutions of civil society take pride in having direct access to the president? In a normal country the situation would be entirely different: The president is the one who should reach out to the civic and political organizations that play such an important role in society by influencing the way people think.

In Russia this relationship is turned upside down. And no one takes "grassroots organizations" at face value.

The battle for democratic principles is once more being waged more from outside the country than from within. It's as if we were back in the 1980s, when the ideals of democratization and glasnost were blowing in from the West. As if we hadn't lived in a market economy for the last 15 years. As if elections, such as they are, and freedom of choice, such as it is, hadn't become the foundation of our everyday lives.

The initial intention of the president and the majority in the State Duma that supports him -- to tighten control over foreign NGOs -- was consistent with their view of the world, which was formed in the Soviet era. In this view, everything foreign is inherently suspicious. These people have enormous difficulty understanding the difference between civic and political activity, especially since in their day and age "political" was almost always synonymous with "subversive." Your average KGB colonel in the late-Soviet era would have found it hard to believe that a foreign organization could do anything in Russia without a hidden agenda.

Now these political suspicions have merged with the boundless cynicism of the current political elite, to whom the concept of altruism is entirely alien. The members of the political elite are always angling for a kickback and they assume that everyone else is doing the same.

In this sense the desire of government officials to control the financing of NGOs is also an attempt to siphon off a portion of this financing for themselves. The lawyer Andrei Makarov, a driving force behind a controversial bill on NGOs now making its way through the Duma, is representative of this logic. Makarov worked as director of the Soros Foundation in the early 1990s, and was shown the door for his ineffective -- to put it mildly -- management of foundation funds. Put simply, a lot of the foundation's money was spent in ways that Soros did not condone.

This pattern has recently begun to surface again. Influential people are making it known in the NGO community that they are ready and willing to help dispense funds received from abroad by creating local intermediaries, preferably attached to a government agency that registers NGOs, which will also handle foreign grants for a reasonable cut. In other words, having a friend on the inside will solve all your problems.

This scheme is reminiscent of the Yukos affair, in which the drive to stamp out political alternatives merged with a run-of-the-mill protection racket for the purpose of carving up someone else's fortune.

The drive to turn nongovernmental organizations into government organizations has encountered little serious resistance here at home, but it has aroused outrage in the West. With Russia set to assume the G8 chair next year, the Kremlin doesn't need this kind of controversy.

This explains why a number of changes were hurriedly made in the NGO bill that comes up for a second reading in the Duma next week. The changes, introduced by Putin himself, significantly tone down the bill's toughest provisions. By the time it clears the Duma, the bill may well be watered down beyond recognition.

Laws in this country are one thing, but the actions of government officials are often quite another. After all, public health and fire inspectors can make life hell for any NGO with no help from the new NGO law. The tax authorities and many other agencies can do the same. It wasn't so long ago that the Salvation Army was forced to close down its operations in Moscow -- ostensibly for failing to register in time.

Georgy Bovt is editor of Profil.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/12/15/007.html


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