The Institute for War & Peace Reporting’s Iraq projects have sadly been in real trouble recently. I don’t know if all their good participants and trainees got snapped up to work for deep-pocket western media people? If so, that’s a real shame, because the project, which produces articles in Arabic and Kurdish editions as well as in English, has always looked poised to make a serious contribution to the development of independent journalism inside Iraq.
However, their projects in the Balkans have been continuing in great shape. I have long been interested in the issue of Kosovo, both in itself and as one of the primary locations for the experiment many western neo-cons and neo-liberals have been undertaking in remaking the world in the way they would like to see it.
Primarily (in Kosovo as in Kurdistan) by nibbling away at the national territory of a nation-state whose leaders they have seriously disagreed with, while making all kinds of promises to the people of the nibbled-away area.
I should recall that unlike many of my friends in the western “human rights” movement I opposed NATO’s war for Kosovo in 1999 and have seen no reason at all since then to revisit the judgment I made on that.
In Kosovo in 1999 as in Iraq four years later, in the lead-up to the war there were people from an internationally mandated monitoring organization on the ground inside the territory up to the point of the western powers declaring the war; and that monitoring presence was doing a fairly good (though not perfect) job of preventing/reducing the evil it was supposed to be monitoring. Then, in both cases, Washington decided it wanted to go to war; the moniotoring presence was then rapidly pulled out; and the situation that subsequently unfolded in Kosovo was then the perpetration of precisely those exact great wrongs that NATO had claimed all along it was seeking to prevent! (In Iraq, after the pullout of the UNMOVIC monitors, the proliferation of weapons–though not of WMDs, since there were none– similarly started precisely after the pull-out of UNMOVIC and the start of the US war.)
Well, all that is now history. What of Kosovo today– a territory that has received fantastically great gobs of western aid and many western promises that everyone’s lives there would be improved by the eviction of the Yugoslav troops and their replacement by NATO?
We could pick up the story, viw IWPR’s reporting, back in mid-March of this year, when former Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj turned himself in to the International Copurt (ICTY) in The Hague where he faced 37 counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war:
- The indictment against him, released to the public on March 10, throws into sharp relief the image he has successfully nurtured in Kosovo in recent years as a respectable statesman and champion of independence for the protectorate
The state of IWPR’s programs in Iraq and Afghanistan is, sadly, IWPR’s own fault. I don’t mean the participants, who are great, or the foreign trainers, such as Steve Negus in Iraq, who have done a super job, but the management in London.
In 2004, IWPR’s management decided that they deserved a swank new office building in London’s overheated real-estate market, and bought one. Where the money was supposed to come from for this is anyone’s guess, but they probably thought they would skim enough out of their big new Iraq and Afghanistan contracts to pay for it.
Subsequently, IWPR was fired by their prime contractor in Iraq, and tried to salvage their new lifestyle by squeezing their Afghanistan program to death. What they couldn’t squeeze, they stole outright, submitting false invoices to the donor and fabricating hundreds of thousands of USD worth of expenses. Once the Afghans understood what was going on, they also fired IWPR, with the blessing of their donors who had caught on. A messy divorce ensued, in which IWPR stole every piece of equipment they could on their way out the door.
Sadly, this is a part of the NGO world seldom reported on — despite being well known among foreign correspondents in Kabul and Bahgdad. The commitment and hard work of participants in the field, especially those who are supposed to benefit from programs like IWPR, are often subverted not so much by the manipulative designs of donors as by the corruption and incompetence of management sitting in comfort at HQ.