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Of Fulvio Scaglione

Source: The eyes of war
I was and remain convinced that in the very early nineties Willy Huber, who then ran the Save the Children hospital in Mogadishu, in Somalia, saved my life. Plus, I have had dozens of contacts, and in some cases deep relationships, with representatives of NGOs in various parts of the world. So let's imagine if I can have a preconceived position towards the so-called "volunteering".
But a crisis is a crisis. And the current one is very profound, and it doesn't just concern the giants overwhelmed by the scandal like Oxfam or those who are reporting themselves because they had already taken measures and don't want to end up in the meat grinder like Save the Children o Doctors Without Borders. So deep that the Charity Commission, the body that supervises NGOs on behalf of the English government, reports receiving over a thousand reports of sexual abuse every year, that concern large organizations, small and tiny. And it is clear that the citizen of good will, the citizen-donor but also the citizen who pays taxes and sees his government entrusting tens of millions to NGOs, he's quick to ask himself a question: if these, in Haiti or elsewhere, they used the organization as a venue for orgies, who knows what happened to my money.

Put it like this, the discussion is useless. When Doctors Without Borders points out that I am alone 40, on his 40 thousand employees, to have committed bad deeds, he's right: one in a thousand is a sociological average, there is one asshole or criminal for every thousand people in any environment. What we should ask ourselves, but, it's not whether the average is acceptable but rather: why 40 thousand? And why 25 thousand Save the children? Because a humanitarian organization must have many thousands more employees than Eni, for example, o, in the case of Doctors Without Borders, really 10 thousand employees more than Ferrero? Because it has to be a multinational? Because it has reached such colossal dimensions?
In other words, we shouldn't worry about the fact that real men and women work in NGOs, with the strengths and weaknesses of all other men and women. We should instead ask ourselves what NGOs have become, and why. We should be concerned with politics.
The NGO boom has its thousandth year, which is precisely all political: il 1991, when Bernard Kouchner, Secretary of State of the second Rocard Government in France and above all former founder, in the seventies, first of Medecins sans Frontieres and then of Medecins du Monde, enunciates the concept of “right to humanitarian interference”. The occasion was Saddam Hussein's repression against the Kurds, the aim is to overthrow the principle of sovereignty of the States. Objective successful, because since then the "humanitarian" motivation has been used successfully by the most powerful countries (the endless lists of "rogue states" compiled by the USA, Russia's defense of Russian-speaking minorities...) not only to help populations at risk but also to overthrow hostile nations or those not so eager to become friends and, ultimately, to pave the way for globalization from which the West above all has benefited.
The interference was conducted with the sound of bombs. The humanitarian was entrusted to NGOs, especially since the nineties. Partly because it was convenient for governments from an economic and organizational point of view, for the old principle according to which the private sector almost always works better than the public sector. And above all because the work of NGOs, as well as greater effectiveness, guaranteed an image of neutrality which was convenient for governments that could not have obtained it in any way, given that they had almost always been protagonists in the creation and then in the management of the crisis.
We need to be precise about this. It's none other than Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and other NGOs have not been or are not "neutral" in their interventions. But it is their position that is objectively non-neutral when they intervene in fronts where a war has been fought, after one party wins and, let it be said, with money provided by the governments of the winning party. The sums reported by Oxfam, to give just one example, that is to say 67 million euros from the EU, 2 by the English Government, 63 dall'him e 57,3 by “other governments” between March 2015 and March 2016 they speak very clearly.
The boom of NGOs, and therefore also their dimensions, is the result of this mechanism. And it was accompanied by another distortion, this too induced by the political convenience of governments. NGOs have become sort of oracles, mouths of truth that could not be contested in any way. This was clearly seen with the issue of migrants in the Mediterranean and the controversies with Minister Minniti. L’idea, widely circulated, was that only NGOs knew what to do to intervene on the problem, even if on closer inspection their proposal was to do nothing, to continue like this. Until open blackmail, with the decision to withdraw the rescue ships because of the situation, with the patrols of the shady Libyan coast guard, it had become too dangerous. Even if none of their organizations talk, for one thing, to withdraw from Afghanistan which is much more dangerous than the Mediterranean.
It's not about it, Therefore, to criminalize NGOs or treat all their volunteers as potential organizers of orgies and other abuses. However, it would be interesting for the NGOs themselves to open a reflection on their role and the mechanism in which they are involved even when they act for the best, as they often do. Now that would be a great political moment, useful to everyone.