Haiti: A Time Bomb Which Must Be Defused Immediately

Addicted to power and white privilege in poor countries, the large NGOs are funded mostly to make way for the imperialist and global corporatocracy stealing natural resources, destroying , for instance, Haiti’s food sovereignty, water, public health, democratic governance. All, the better to make a market and jobs for foreigners, their vaccines, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals behind the mask of “development.”

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” — Lily Watson

 

There’s a reason to recall the efforts responsible Haitians make to survive the Western rabid rage hidden behind the do-gooders’ benevolence.

Few in power want to hear that  the World bank and the International Monetary Fund  contain the poor in war, poverty, disease so to save them with Paul Farmer pharmaceuticals, USAID tied-aid, the Clintons’ subsidized Arkansas rice and Monsanto GMOs-hybrid seeds.  Not when this is the age where Barrack Obama nominates Paul Farmer’s partner, Jim Yom Kim, co-founder of what some from Haiti call  “Partners in Death”, to head the World Bankers fleecing Black and poor countries worldwide.

It’s not news that the post-World War II alliance, use the World Bank, the IMF, the IFIs and the UN to pillage poor countries and continue the old colonial lines of domination.

Addicted to power and white privilege in poor countries, the large NGOs are funded mostly to make way for the imperialist and global corporatocracy stealing natural resources, destroying , for instance, Haiti’s food sovereignty, water, public health, democratic governance. All, the better to make a market and jobs for foreigners, their vaccines, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals behind the mask of “development.”

Certainly in this age, the Nobel Laureates won’t be lining up to honor and give prizes to the homeless street boys in Haiti who dug up the earthquake victims, lifting steel and concrete, saving lives with bare, bleeding hands. Won’t be lining up to honor Haitians battling to end the US occupation. Won’t be lining up to honor  and give those, like Rea Dol, Jean Ristil Jean Baptise, Jean Jafrikayiti Saint-Vil, Yves Point Du Jou, Dahoud Andre, Pierre Labossiere or Ezili Dantò a peace prize for saving lives, battling tyranny. The neocolonial narrative on Haiti won’t allow it.

We don’t exist. Whitemen speak for us. Mr-lets-hoard-it-all wants everything.

He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Walk with honor.

Sean Penn is saving us along with Paul Farmer and his acolytes. We who have made no dishonorable alliances and stood, from the beginning, against the return to dictatorship, oppression, re-colonization of Haiti, don’t exist. In fact, they say they treat Haitians well.  You know, as well as the godly Thomas Jefferson was treating 14-year old Sally Hemings nightly at Monticello. As well as the slaveholders who provided food and shelter to their slaves and only really beat them senseless when they were not working hard enough on the plantation, or were so ungrateful as to speak for themselves, or escape.

He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Die with honor. Suffer humiliating pains, defeats. Endure.

Constantly under fire. But made of fire. Unborn. Never burn. We roll with it. Handling seismic shifts.  Freestyling to murder Tarzan, Jane and their Uncle Toms.

Acid and Clorox hunger we know. Stigmas we know. World Bank structural adjustment policies we know. IFM death plans we know. We’re never filled with the humiliating defeats. Our sorrows run deep. Yet and still, Ibo granmoun lakay Ibo.

We don’t exist. We’re the Haitians who save ourselves. We keep honor. We reMEMBER, always. The Ancestors. Don’t forget their traditional enemies. Never.  Bay kou bliye pote mak sonje.

“Cut your chains and you are free. Cut your roots and you die” –Haitian Proverb

What is the Ottawa Initiative?

Haitians and those still blind or in denial and who are participating in the International crime and travesty going on in Haiti right now are urged to recall the Ottawa Initiative .

What is the Ottawa Initiative?  Why is there a UN, Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in Haiti for 8 years? A country not at war, without a peace agreement to enforce and with less violence than most countries in the Western Hemisphere?  (See the UN’s own Global Study on Homicide at page 93 ).

Why is Haiti the only place in the world where the UN has a Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission without a peace agreement amongst warring parties to enforce? Why is the third largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world really in Haiti?

What’s the secret behind the rush of the international mining and oil companies to Haiti?

Why the amazing strings of catastrophes in tiny Haiti these last 8-years of occupation? During the period since US regime change in 2004, the US managed to build, in “corrupt” and “resource-less” Haiti, the largest US Embassy in the Western Hemisphere and the 5th largest US Embassy in the world after Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Germany. (See Haiti’s Riches, and Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the US occupation.)

The majority in Haiti have not been allowed to vote in elections since the US occupation began. Haitians suffer Clorox hunger, yearly floods and drownings, no development. The US military closed schools when they landed in 2004, which still have not reopened. The UN’s personnel sodomize a Haiti child daily. The UN mission in Haiti is getting paid nearly one billion dollars per year by the Western powers.

Haitians abroad have not been spared either. A puppet government is in place doing what an authentic government would never be able to get cooperation from the world bankers and financing houses to do.

The powerful  bankers and global politicians have finally found a way to tax the poor majority by unilaterally, without accountability, authorizing taxing Diaspora phone calls and remittances. The  $2billion,360million per year in Diaspora remittances is the only real direct and aid-with-dignity the people actually get.

But the world turns away, marginalizes Haiti and other voices who tell the truth.

Paul Farmer and his UN and World Bankers continue to “heal” Haitians from the “threat” we pose to ourselves they advertise, not to the white predatory system.  They’ve brought us “healing” with UN guns, (37,000?) NGOs , foreign diseases, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, pedophiles, priests, charity workers and such.

What is the Ottawa Initiative? In 2002, high level Western officials secretly got together in Ottawa, Canada and made plans for Haiti because Haiti with popular democracy was a “threat to North American countries. “

The expressed and reported concern was that “Haiti might have, by some estimates, a population of 20 million by 2019…It is a time bomb, the high level Canadian diplomat said, ‘which must be defused immediately.’” (The Ottawa Initiative; and Transcending the 2002 Ottawa Initiative.)

We are the Haitians

We shall overcome this latest US occupation and subjugation. We are the Haitians. The first to put liberty into application in the Western Hemisphere. The first to help liberate five “Latin” American countries.

The first to bring the music now called Jazz into being in the West. The first to beat all the European powers and their white settle derivatives in combat and end slavery, direct colonialism, the slave trade, forced assimilation. The first to defeat the Western bankers attempts at taxing the labor of the peasants through control of the foreign-backed Bank of Haiti.

The first, in the 1946 Haiti Revolution, to successful overthrow a U.S.-backed regime in the Americas. The first to reject bourgeois democracy. The first to refuse to make taxable income for the bankers, mulatto elites and politicians to enrich themselves, preferring a peasant ownership economy pursuing balance, Viv, family stability, Lakou sufficiency, not wealth, not profit to become taxable income. Haitians work to live, not live to work.

Haiti was the first to reject wage-slavery – the Western serf-like system of valuing and turning the human body/soul into a commodity useful solely for its labor for making profit for some bigmen’s enterprise, or to improve someone else’s land and life. Haitians prefer to be small business entrepreneurs on their own plot of land, living the sunny ocean, small farmers Island life without government interference or taxation without representation.

Haitians suffer the agony of endless debt, domination, starvation, imported diseases and all sorts of other deprivation to deny the Western inhuman economic and value systems.

In 1990 with the election of Aristide, the Haitians were the first to thwart US imperialism hidden behind the pretense of bringing democracy through sham elections and the false promises of tied aid.

The Haitians see through the current US occupation behind UN guns and shall again successfully overcome all US-backed puppet regimes, until the subjugation of the voice of the Haitian peasant and patriot stops, sovereignty regained, the foreigners, white saviors and their NGOs and World Bank bankers are gone.

He forgets. We reMEMBER. Laugh. Do battle. Live with honor. The Haitian union forged at Bwa Kayiman has never wavered. Nou se Ginen, nou fè yon sèl kò.

The Bwa Kayiman call is still our call.

Ezili Dantò,
Li led, li la
March, 2012

*********

“Si nou fè silans,
Y’ap fè l pou nou,
Y’ap fè l sans nou
Y’ap fè l kont nou…Ki vle di, pran peyi Ayiti lan men nou…”–Alina Sixto , Sept. 2007

Jorge Capelán, Lizzie Phelan and Toni Solo Discuss USAID and Western NGOs in Latin America

InSight Bores to New Depths; USAID, WB, Embassy, La Prensa Rally for More Militarization in SPS

03/28/2012

AP | Adrienne Pine

Tawakkul Karman: A Tool for Farcical Democratic Initiatives in the Middle East

By Samra Nasser

02.23.2012

The Arab American News

Who is Tawakkul Karman and more importantly, how and why has this religiously-dressed Yemeni woman come to be the darling of Western-oriented democracy movements?  To understand who is actually reaping the rewards of this activist, we should begin by following the money.  Mrs. Karman has a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Sana’a, Yemen called Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC).  However, for those of you who may not know, an NGO is not always non-governmental because many NGOs invariably receive all or most of their funding through various departments within the government.

Tawakkul Karman

In Mrs. Karman’s case, her WJWC organization asserts it is a non-governmental organization in Yemen that seeks to advocate for rights and freedoms, especially freedom of expression with the aim of improving media efficiency and providing skills for journalists, and particularly women and youth.  Such work, however, should be considered in the correct context being that its funding sources are through U.S. foreign policy organizations. The organization has been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) since 2008.

NED is a quasi-governmental foundation created by the Reagan Administration in 1983 to channel millions of Federal dollars into anti-Communist ‘private diplomacy.’ It is funded primarily through an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress within the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a subsidiary of the U.S. State Department.

NED has a vast influence over U.S. foreign policy initiatives, by way of its Board of Directors who simultaneously represent numerous powerful multinational corporations (MNCs) ranging from AT&T to Boeing to Fannie Mae.  →

FLASHBACK: Obama Continuing to Spend $20 Million on USAID Subversion in Cuba

Granma

Havana, Cuba, June 16, 2011

by Jean-Guy Allard

WHILE the economic crisis is sentencing hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens to poverty, the Washington government continues channeling tens of millions of dollars into plans of interference whose ineffectiveness is well known.

This is the case with USAID subversion plots in Cuba which, according to analysts, have merely served to prompt the arrest and sentencing of one of the employee’s of this State Department body.

The U.S. administration’s obsession for programs costing $20 million to “promote democracy in Cuba” and which are a front for intelligence and destabilization activities, has come up against the decision taken by Senator John Kerry, head of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to suspend funds for these programs on April 1.

The USAID programs aimed at Cuba and comprising “investments” in anti-government groups and intelligence have ineffectively cost $150 million from the 90s. →

USAID Grants $3 Million to Solidarity Center’s Bogotá Office – Unionists Want to Know Why

by James Jordan (Alliance for Global Justice)

The Solidarity Center office in Bogotá has received an unusually large two-year grant of $3 million for its operations in the Andean Region. The scope and dimensions of the grant are not fully known, nor the exact programs to which it will be applied. However, given the history of the Bogotá office and the Solidarity Center’s Andean representatives, observers expect the grant to have major implications for the countries of Colombia and Venezuela, where the office’s work is usually concentrated. The Andean region also covers Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. The Solidarity Center has offices both in Colombia and Peru.

The grant comes from USAID (the United States Agency for International Development). The office receives notice of this funding at the same time that three key developments are underway–in Venezuela, the coming October elections, and in Colombia, the implementation of the new Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US, coinciding with a massive popular mobilization to demand a political solution to the armed and social conflict. Little information is available concerning the details of the grant. Because of the documented history of the AFL-CIO intervention in Venezuela through its Solidarity Center, activists must analyze past history and current circumstances in order to be able to discuss intelligently what we may anticipate from these augmented activities.

The Solidarity Center is one of four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a creation of the United States’ largest union center, the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Unions). Along with the Solidarity Center, the four core institutes of the NED are: the International Republican Institute (associated with the Republican Party), the National Democratic Institute (associated with the Democratic Party), and the International Center for Private Enterprise (associated with the Chambers of Commerce).The NED was established by the US government in 1983, during the Reagan administration.

The NED exists for one reason–to manipulate governments, social movements and elections in other countries in order to advance the international policies of the US which, in turn, are designed to accommodate private access to natural resources and increase transnational corporate profits. In an interview with the New York Times in 1991, Allen Weinstein, one of the NED’s founders, said that, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly by the CIA.”

Marc Plattner, an NED Vice President, explains the role of the organization in the context of the Imperial strategy that brings together in one fabric the threads of politics, business and the military: “Liberal democracy clearly favors the economic arrangements that foster globalization ….The international order that sustains globalization is underpinned by American military predominance.”

The Solidarity Center receives over 90% of its funding from the public coffers by means of the Department of State, USAID and the NED. Union contributions are typically around two to three percent. Thus, the Solidarity Center has little to do with union locals and rank and file unionists, although it has the full cooperation of the highest officials of the AFL-CIO. Local unions have no input or say in the establishment of international relations or program development. The Solidarity Center has some good and helpful programs and some that are at least more or less benign. But these good programs can act to hide a more fundamental purpose to infiltrate and influence the labor movements of other countries and to provide a channel of interference in their electoral processes.

The NED’s first “success” in Latin America was the defeat of Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista candidate for President, in the Nicaraguan elections of 1990. The US government, via the NED and other channels, spent more than $20 per voter and effectively bought the victory for Violeta Chamorra, its favored candidate. The US spent more per Nicaraguan voter in 1990 than both parties did in the US presidential elections in 1988. It is notable that at the time, Nicaragua sustained a population of only 3 million persons.

Haiti provides another example of how the Solidarity Center operates. in 2004, the Solidarity Center’s partner, the International Republican Institute, not only funded, but convened and trained the coup plotters against the elected government of Pres. Bertrand Aristide. During 2004 and 2005, beginning before the coup and extending into the months afterward there was a bloodbath against the supporters of Aristide that included among its victims members of the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH). Rather than helping this most targeted union, the Solidarity Center channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a small labor organization that before and during the coup did nothing to defend the elected government and, in fact, called for Pres. Aristide to step down. →

ALBA Expels USAID from Member Countries

Source: Gramma Cuba

Jun 22nd 2012

Translated by Rachael Boothroyd for Venezuelananalysis

Resolution from the Political Council of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) for the immediate withdrawal of USAID from member countries of the alliance.

On behalf of the Chancellors of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Federal Republic of Brazil, on June 21^st 2012.

Given the open interference of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the internal politics of the ALBA countries, under the excuse of “planning and administering economic and humanitarian assistance for the whole world outside of the United States,” financing non-governmental organizations and actions and projects designed to destabilise the legitimate governments which do not share their common interests.

Knowing the evidence brought to light by the declassified documents of the North American State Department in which the financing of organisations and political parties in opposition to ALBA countries is made evident,  in a clear and shameless interference in the internal political processes of each nation.

Given that this intervention of a foreign country in the internal politics of a country is contrary to the internal legislation of each nation.

On the understanding that in the majority of ALBA countries, USAID, through its different organisations and disguises, acts in an illegal manner with impunity, without possessing a legal framework to support this action, and illegally financing the media, political leaders and non-governmental organisations, amongst others.

On the understanding that through these financing programmes they are supporting NGOs which promote all kind of fundamentalism in order to conspire and limit the legal authority of our states, and in many cases, widely loot our natural resources on territory which they claim to control at their own free will.

Conscious of the fact that our countries do not need any kind of external financing for the maintenance of our democracies, which are consolidated through the will of the Latin American and Caribbean people, in the same way that we do not need organisations in the charge of foreign powers which, in practice, usurp and weaken the presence of state organisms and prevent them from developing the role that corresponds to them in the economic and social arena of our populations.

We resolve to:

Request that the heads of state and the government of the states who are members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, immediately expel USAID and its delegates or representatives from their countries, due to the fact that we consider their presence and actions to constitute an interference which threatens the sovereignty and stability of our nations.

In the city of Rio de Janeiro, Federal Republic of Brazil, June 21st 2012.

Signed by:

The government of the Pluri-national state of Bolivia.

The government of the Republic of Cuba.

The government of the Republic of Ecuador.

The government of the Commonwealth of Dominica.

The government of the Republic of Nicaragua.

The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Translated by Rachael Boothroyd for Venezuelanalysis

WATCH:

WATCH: How the U.S. Government and Nonprofits Found Each Other: USAID

WATCH: How the U.S. Government and Nonprofits Found Each Other: USAID

http://youtu.be/_ctbVfLuuXw

President and CEO of Direct Relief International, Thomas Tighe, in a provocative piece of video describing the unsavory relationship between international NGO’s and the U.S. Government – specifically that of USAID (the US Agency for International Development). The organizations only get funding according the their acquiescence to the government’s terms and conditions.  Therefore, the ‘beneficent’ relationship is inextricably linked to the criteria of Western imperialism.

Casing Point: In 2009, declassified documents obtained by investigators Jeremy Bigwood and Eva Golinger revealed that USAID had invested more than $97 million in “decentralization” and “regional autonomy” projects and opposition political parties in Bolivia since 2002.

Bolivia is and will remain a country of people who desperately struggle to resist Imperialism and fight for their autonomy — against all odds.

Postcard from Haiti: Life After the 2010 Quake

June 19, 2012

This is a joint post with Julie Walz. 

On January 16, 2010, at 16:53 hours, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the city of Port-au-Prince, killing over 200,000 people and leaving several million homeless.  Foreign aid poured into Haiti, at the rate of almost a thousand dollars per Haitian.  For the past two years, we have been putting together the various pieces of data we could find on aid flows and foreign involvement after the quake. We found that the big international NGOs and private contractors have been the primary recipients of billions of dollars in U.S. assistance have been not been required to report systematically on how they use the funds. There has been a lack of accountability to both the funders and recipients.  Our preliminary impressions based on our visit to Haiti are that this lack of accountability is if anything worse on the ground: the NGOs are frequently not accountable to the Haitian government or to the people they aim to serve.  We even learned something about earthquakes–for example, did you know that Haiti’s two major faults (the northern Sententrional fault and the southern Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault) are called slip-strike faults, and are similar to the San Andreas Fault in California? It was the southern fault that triggered the quake two and a half years ago.

Last week, we finally got a chance to visit Haiti.  It was hot and dusty when we arrived at the Port-au-Prince airport.  While most of the rubble has been cleared, many roads and buildings still had scars from the quake.  As we left the airport and headed to the hills above Port-au-Prince, we began to notice the walls.  Walls that were 25 to 50 feet high; some even higher, accompanied by security guards and entry gates.  These walls surround the offices of various NGOs, foreign government missions, and diplomatic residences.  During our brief visit to Haiti, they became symbolic of the enormous divide between the foreign assistance community who live fairly comfortably in the hill towns of Petion-ville and surrounding areas, and ordinary Haitians in Port-au-Prince who suffer from extreme poverty, limited services, and increasing levels of violence.

Our visit to Haiti was facilitated in part by Kent Annan of Haiti Partners, who has deep ties in the country because of his long-term presence there.  Our guide and interpreter, Cara Kennedy, who has family ties in Haiti and speaks Creole fluently, also helped us to meet locals.  We are enormously grateful to Kent and Cara; through them, we met with professors at the university, a writer, and several Haitians running small NGOs, who have a deep understanding of local culture and norms.  The conversations we had with these individuals were invaluable to our understanding of what has happened in Haiti since the quake.  Some of the repeated themes and key takeaways are:

1. The $9 billion that was disbursed to NGOs and other intermediaries in a period of twenty-seven months has been spent largely without consultation of local Haitians.  Almost no one we interviewed had been contacted by members of the foreign assistance community to discuss local needs.  Due to a fears about security, a strongly-held perception of lack of local capacity, and the need to disburse money quickly, international NGOs have set up programs and carried out construction projects that are often at odds with local needs, and sometimes harmful in the longer-term.  The United Nations Logistics Center, near the airport, was virtually inaccessible to Haitians in the period immediately following the quake.  The brand new U.S. embassy, housing the largest USAID mission in the world, is like a fortress, complete with a perimeter of sandbags and armed guards.  A lack of communication often means mistakes are made, for instance we learned of a housing project constructed by an NGO over a watershed for Port-au-Prince, in violation of environmental guidelines and the Government of Haiti’s own rules.

2. International NGOs have frequent staff turnover and very high costs.  In the aftermath of the quake, we learned that senior staff came and went, some staying as little as a few weeks.  A new arrival meant starting all over again, often with an individual who had little knowledge of Haiti and no knowledge of Creole (or even French).   The cost of maintaining expatriate staff in Haiti is very high.  According to the Miami Herald, it can cost upwards of $200,000 annually in housing and other benefits to keep a senior-level manager in Haiti. Some of our interviewees explained how NGOs and foreign workers are exempt from Haitian taxes and often do not follow Haitian registration requirements.  Donors have spent billions of dollars trying to repair Haiti’s broken infrastructure, largely with their own goods and labor.  In the meantime, most Haitians in Port-au-Prince spend their day trying to sell a few vegetables or fruit or other goods on the sidewalk, which in most cases, does not generate enough money to feed themselves or their families.

3. We repeatedly heard stories about the unintended economic and social consequences of the influx of foreign workers.  Housing costs in certain areas have skyrocketed – rentals easily go for over $30,000 per year, with some houses being rented for a lot more. Restaurants and supermarkets in certain areas of Petion-ville cater exclusively to foreign tastes, and prices of basic goods have been driven up to a level that even middle-class Haitians cannot afford.  Social norms and practices have been impacted as well.  We heard stories about how houses built by NGOs after the quake were not appropriate for most Haitian families–tradition dictates a partition in the house, no matter how small, but the new homes did not have these.  Rumors that access to temporary tents meant access to permanent housing in the long term caused families to split up, sometimes with disastrous social consequences.  The leader of a small, grassroots NGO explained to us that he now has difficulty drawing people to meetings and outreach unless he provides food or compensation for participants, like the foreign NGOs do.  The Haitian concept of “konbit” (working the land of other farmers as part of the community) has been challenged as foreign NGOs have started to pay farmers on an individual basis for soil-conservation and community farming.  One of our interviewees pointed out to us, gently, that some NGOs are “slowly destroying the fabric of Haitian society.

Almost three years after the quake, we need to ask ourselves what we could have done differently.  Many people asked that the United States make significant investments in training, thereby giving Haitians the opportunity to study in American universities and training centers.  We also heard about the need to form networks of local and international NGOs to ensure that projects are guided by local knowledge.  Our interviewees requested the foreign assistance community rethink their assumptions about corruption that have led to almost complete circumvention of the Haitian government, and instead to examine how interventions can serve to reinforce the fledgling efforts of the Government of Haiti.  They were less enthusiastic about the used clothing, furniture, and other goods that have poured into Haiti since the quake.  One interviewee put it bluntly: “we need sustainable projects, not temporary solutions.”  Our colleague Michael Clemens has made the case that the US needs to open up to more Haitian workers, which will provide much-needed employment and remittances.  And while the United States government has signed on to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), little has been done to improve the transparency of aid flows.  Almost three years after quake, we do not know where the money has gone – a point that became even more evident after this trip.  We have argued that the lack of accountability of NGO expenditure in Haiti is unacceptable, and that better monitoring, evaluation, and reporting by international NGOs and the United States government is critical to the effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance programs, in Haiti and elsewhere.

Using NGOs to Coerce Nations

by Sandhya Jain

Source: The Pioneer

May 8, 2012

Western nations fund NGOs operating in developing countries to influence policy and subvert institutions. India does not need foreign-funded NGOs.

Why the CIA Funds Nonviolence Training

Dissident Voice

by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, March 13th, 2012

O]ne important aspect of the debate over “diversity of tactics” (i.e. the decision whether to be exclusively nonviolent) in the Occupy movement relates to mounting evidence of the role CIA and Pentagon-funded foundations and think tanks play in funding and promoting nonviolent resistance training. The two major US foundations promoting nonviolence, both overseas and domestically, are the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Both receive major corporate and/or government funding, mostly via CIA “pass through” foundations. While the ICNC is funded mainly by the private fortune of hedge fund billionaire (junk bond king Michael Milken’s second in command) Peter Ackerman, the AEI has received funding from the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense, as well as various “pass-through” foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the US Institute of Peace and the Ford Foundation (see The Ford Foundation and the CIA),which all have a long history of collaborating with the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA in destabilizing governments unfriendly to US interests.

This is a strategy Frances Stonor Saunders outlines in her pivotal Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. According to Sanders, right wing corporate-backed foundations and the CIA have been funding the non-communist left since the late sixties, in the hope of drowning out and marginalizing the voice of more militant leftists. It’s also noteworthy that the governing and advisory board of both AEI and ICNC have been consistently dominated by individuals with either a military/intelligence background or a history of prior involvement with CIA “pass-through” foundations, such as NED and USAID.

Gene Sharp, the Fervent Anticommunist

Much of this debate focuses around America’s godfather of nonviolent resistance, Gene Sharp, the founder and director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp’s handbooks on nonviolent protest were widely disseminated in the Eastern Europe color revolutions, in the Arab spring revolutions and in the Occupy movement in the US (see Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism). Unfortunately Sharp has become a decoy in this debate, deflecting attention from the larger question of whether the US government is actively financing and promoting the work of the AEI, the ICIC and other high profile organizations that promote nonviolent civil disobedience. The question is extremely important, in my view, because it possibly explains the rigid and dogmatic attitude in the US progressive movement regarding nonviolent civil disobedience. In other words, I think it explains the knee-jerk rejection of more militant tactics, such as smashing windows and other property damage that don’t involve physical violence towards human beings.

Is Military-Intelligence Funding Compatible with Progressive Politics?

The institutional nonviolence clique has cleverly refocused the debate on whether Sharp, who is 83, is a CIA agent and whether he actively participated in US-funded destabilization efforts in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and elsewhere that resulted in so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The obvious answer to both questions is no. For me the more important question is why the alternative media and “official” progressive movement embrace Sharp unconditionally as a fellow progressive without a careful look at his past or his ideological beliefs. Sharp has never made any secret of his fervent anticommunist (and antisocialist – he shares the US State Department’s animosity towards Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez) views.

Sharp makes no secret of the funding he has received from the Defense Department; the Rand Corporation; CIA-linked foundations, such as NED, the IRI and the US Institute of Peace; and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. All this information is readily available from the AEI website. Sharp himself states, “I have been arguing for years that governments and defense departments – as well as other groups – should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics and especially as a possible basis for a defense policy by prepared nonviolent resistance as a substitute for war.” (See The living library: some theoretical approaches to a strategy for activating human rights and peace, George Garbutt, 2008, Southern Cross University).

Less well known is the role military and intelligence figures have played in helping Sharp set up and run the AEI. I think most progressives would be extremely disturbed by the major role played by the military-intelligence establishment in funding and running the AEI. I think they would find it even more troubling that progressives who refer to any of this on so called “independent” or “alternative” media websites and blogs have their posts removed.

To be continued.