The NGO’s are organizations formed by citizens on voluntary basis for representing their voices on issues not addressed or inadequately addressed by their governments in the national and international arena. The NGO’S are very significant vehicles in practice of democracy by citizens. They are important elements of a functioning civil society.
It is important that they are not governmental, but rather, by intention, they embody the citizens working as one element of checks and balances in a democratic society to keep the elected government honest and direct it towards the needs of the citizens.
The NGO’s do not represent the corporations, which have their powerful and well financed lobbying groups and think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The American Enterprise Institute would like to have the connection of the government and the corporations strong and eliminate any checks and balances or influence by the citizens. If nothing else, the NGO’s are the lobbying arm of the citizens who pull their resources together to bring their opinions to the halls of power where the ordinary citizen is not welcomed.
The NGO’S have historically played a much needed role of giving voice to the powerless, especially the voice of women and girls. The hard work of many women organized as NGO’s culminated in the United Nations (UN) First International Women’s Conference in Mexico City in 1975. In this conference, for the first time, the member nations of the UN discussed the economic, social, political and human rights of women. In the subsequent International Conferences in Copenhagen, Nairobi and Beijing, women and their NGO’s worked hard and long on meager budgets and their own resources to produce an actual Platform of Action to be adopted by member nations. These conferences brought about a gathering of women from all over the world, from the little villages in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and from the cities of Europe and North America.
These conferences and their resulting documents addressed the never-before-mentioned issues of reproductive rights, female genital mutilation, the rights of the girl child, and basic human rights for women, all with the slogan “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”. The NGO’s continue their efforts in their own countries in pressuring their governments to adopt, ratify and implement these resolutions and plans.
The work of these NGO’s has been intrinsic to the development of UN resolutions such as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; and Security Council Resolution 1325, which, for the first time, specifically addresses the impact of war on women, and women’s contribution to conflict resolution and sustainable peace.
It is important to point out that the US has not ratified the CEDAW or the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the second instance, the US shares this distinction with just one other county, Somalia.
Non-governmental organizations (e. g. the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and MADRE) have worked for decades in the trenches helping women and girls in their everyday lives, setting up schools, bakeries, clinics, and economic cooperatives. The NGOs have worked to expose violence against women and children.
At a time like this, when the US military is involved in countless wars and conflicts around the world, and the UN reports that civilians, particularly women and children, account for the vast majority of those affected by armed conflict, the efforts of the NGOs in protecting women and children in the face of violence takes a special importance. Their efforts have produced Resolution 1325, which calls for the participation of women in conflict resolution, peacemaking, international humanitarian efforts, inclusion of gender perspective in economic development, appointment of women as special representatives of the UN to field operations, and addressing the needs of women and girls in repatriation and resettlement. In this resolution, the Security Council classifies sexual and other crimes against women and girls in the context of war as war crimes, and “. . . stresses the need to exclude these crimes, where feasible, from amnesty provisions”.
It is in such dire times, as the US government refuses to accept the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court and pressures other countries to agree never to prosecute US personnel for war crimes, that the AEI decides to attack the legitimacy of the NGO’s. This attack seems in keeping with the role of AEI, which has been to serve up the ideology of the Neo-cons under the cover of “respected” research. The respected and lofty thinkers of the AEI supported the lies of the Bush administration as justification for going to war with Iraq. They do no original research but hastily prepare background cheerleading sound for the actions of the US Empire.
SR/wjw 2003-06-11