COMMENTS: Better NED Than Dead?
Morley, Jefferson
Just down the hall from a door marked "20th Century Fox," on the third floor of a nondescript office building on the edge of downtown Washington, D.C., are the offices of the National...
...It too deserves NED support (Not surprisingly, Gershman disagrees saying, "The situation is not at all analogous...
...Attacking communists might be sufficient reason for Congress to aid a guerrilla army thousands of miles away, but it is not sufficient rationale to fund an agency down the block...
...Conservatives insisted that the list was skewed toward liberalism...
...Last spring the Endowment made the news when its president, Carl Gershman, former aide to U.N...
...Thus, it would seem, demanding that the government account for political prisoners and assassinations is "political" and therefore unacceptable behavior in Guatemala— but not in Poland...
...It comes as no surprise when Gershman adds that NED has not received an application for assistance from the Mutual Support Group...
...Gershman's assumption was that the Endowment requirement of "diversity" could be objectively measured and that the judgment of the recipient—no matter what its democratic convictions—was not good enough to meet that standard...
...This hardly means that NED is irreversibly tainted, only that it needs drastic rehabilitation...
...The Association had, after receiving NED funding, sent a list of books to the Moscow Book Fair that did not, in Gershman's view, reflect the "diversity" of American life...
...NED funding could help its editor, Jorge Pinto, resume publishing...
...But because the press and NED's critics in Congress have paid little attention to what the "D" in its name stands for, they have missed the importance of the Endowment to Reagan's foreign policy...
...Gershman's unspoken proviso for NED aid is that the democratic group be able to reach a "clear understanding" with the Endowment that it will not do anything that might force him to exercise his "supervisory responsibility...
...NED is best thought of as part of the conservative effort to institutionalize the Reagan Doctrine...
...But the Doctrine's global ambitions require that the battle be carried to peaceful fronts as well...
...A National Endowment for Anticommunism would not (yet) sell on Capitol Hill, much less in the Third World...
...It must drop its notion that Americans must exercise "supervisory responsibility" over the democrats of the world...
...And in April 1984 NED caught hell from Reagan's own ambassador in Panama in a State Department cable after it was discovered that NED was funding a supposedly nonpartisan labor institute in Panama that gave $20,000 to a presidential candidate in a hotly contested election...
...Where NED does focus its activities, it must aid organizations that truly need support...
...Having assumed that Reagan's definition of democracy is the same as their own, they can only charge NED with violating bureaucratic procedures and hope it doesn't happen again...
...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and former director of Social Democrats USA, criticized the Association of American Publishers...
...Controversy has regularly wafted out of this unlikely bureaucratic outpost over the last two years...
...Particularly embarrassing was the news that more than $500,000 of the money funded a student group that had fewer than 1,000 members and that had been founded as the offshoot of a gangland organization known for its violent and criminal predilections...
...Democratic groups abroad understand this and have made it clear that they are not available for duty in Reagan's army...
...NED has funded groups similar to the Mutual Support Group before...
...Certain activities by democrats," Gershman went on to explain, "may not necessarily increase democracy...
...Upon arrival they were greeted by AFL-CIO officials, including Irving Brown, the director of the labor federation's Free Trade Union Institute in Paris and the largest single recipient of NED funds...
...NED has given aid to La Prensa in Nicaragua, the Managua daily that faces Sandinista censorship for its antigovernment inclinations...
...Five top Argentine military commanders were convicted in December for directing a government program that killed 9,000 people, many of them democrats...
...It noted, again correctly, that the absence of gross human rights violations was no guarantor of freedom...
...Gershman told his directors that NED "would learn from this experience and that the Endowment would be better prepared to anticipate problems...
...I asked Gershman if NED would give the Mutual Support Group money to produce a similar, albeit much fatter, report on governmental abuses in Guatemala...
...I asked Gershman if he would fund the Center for Legal and Social Studies in Argentina...
...When democratic South Africans choose to support the African National Congress, we should not assume that we know better than they do...
...Above all, the Endowment must drop Gershman's all-purpose fear of those "certain activities" —one hears the echo of un-American activities —"by democrats that do not increase democracy...
...With only thirteen employees, the Endowment's bureaucratto-scandal ratio is impressive even by the Reagan administration's standards...
...But none of them has ever gained NED funding because their activities might well have disturbed Gershman...
...There are dozens of democratic groups around the world that NED could have funded in the last two years...
...Consider, for example, the Mutual Support Group in Guatemala...
...The Endowment's assistance to democrats in Eastern Europe should continue...
...NED's critics, they say, are carpers at best...
...In 1984 the Endowment gave $20,880 to the International Freedom to Publish Committee (a subsidiary of the Association of American Publishers) to send 300 American books to the Moscow Book Fair...
...The Endowment funds a think tank sponsored by leftand right-wing and center parties...
...One does not have to be a right-wing ideologue to support groups like Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia...
...The leader of the South African delegation angrily refused even to sit with AFL-CIO officials...
...Embassy in Guatemala...
...In El Salvador, the last moderate newspaper, El Independiente, was closed by government troops in January 1981...
...The Fair is one occasion for at least a few Soviet people to have relatively free access to books from the West...
...Carter's "human rights" emphasis is in fact essential to promoting democracy...
...Gershman repeatedly cites Endowment activities in Chile as proof that NED will support democrats of the left as well as those of the right...
...146 The flap over the Moscow Book Fair list confirmed that Endowment officials reserve the right of ultimate judgment regarding even the slightest political deviations of NED recipients...
...Gershman is too modest...
...Congressional representatives who support the Endowment, but wonder why NED thought democracy was in trouble in France, are defeated by this defense...
...It has denounced the abuses of the Guatemalan government and suffered appalling terrorist attacks for its trouble...
...In practice, neither an organization's history, stated principles, nor ongoing activities are enough to prove its democratic credentials to the Endowment...
...He publicly denounced the list...
...Western Europe today fits intc none of those categories...
...We haven't gotten a proposal from them [the center] that would encourage democracy in Argentina in a constructive and creative way," Gershman said...
...So NED officials take pains to emphasize that recipients must be not only anticommunist but prodemocratic...
...But, of course, Endowment officials, like most minimally percep147 tive conservative thinkers, now realize that Pinochet's nakedly fascistic dictatorship is likely to ultimately aid the Chilean left, and not just the communists...
...THE FOUNDATIONS OF PLURALISM COUld be further bolstered without reference to the East-West struggle...
...Not only are NED's opponents losing the debate over funding, they are losing an invaluable opportunity to offer a vision of U.S...
...And in early 1986 the Congress of South African Trade Unions decided to forgo any formal ties with the Free Trade Union Institute or with NED...
...Just down the hall from a door marked "20th Century Fox," on the third floor of a nondescript office building on the edge of downtown Washington, D.C., are the offices of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED...
...The grants to the French groups, however, suggest that NED's criteria for "prodemocratic" is somewhat elastic...
...The Endowment could give priority to countries and regions where democracy is nonexistent, fragile, or endangered...
...The Doctrine is usually defined by its advocacy of active military aid to anticommunist rebels around the globe...
...GERSHMAN AND OTHER DEFENDERS of the Endowment contend that these flaps are just media nitpicking...
...In Haiti, Radio Soleil, the Catholic Church's radio network, has been shut down for the same offense...
...The publisher's association offered to return the grant, and NED gladly accepted...
...That critique rightly noted that democratic and pluralist political systems are the best guarantors of basic human rights...
...THE MUTUAL SUPPORT GROUP, not coincidentally, is scorned by the U.S...
...The democratic left, it should be clear, is only eligible for Endowment support insofar as it enlists in the larger goals of the Reagan administration...
...The neoconservatives immediately betrayed both ideas by proclaiming violent anticommunist regimes to be budding democracies and hailing the alleged decline of monstrous violence as the beginnings of embryonic democracy...
...foreign policy that would be considerably more democratic and effective than Ronald Reagan's...
...We're not interested in engaging in support for human rights [advocates] that are engaged in political programs," he said...
...Democracy" is in the eye of the beholder, i.e., Endowment president Gershman...
...This part of the job is assigned to the Endowment...
...Black union leaders from South Africa, for example, visited Washington in early 1985...
...You have to ask what will best promote democracy in these certain circumstances," he said...
...Raul Alfonsin has tirelessly reiterated in Argentina (and Vinicio Cerezo is now emphasizing in Guatemala) that accountability is the essence of democratic rule of law...
...They note correctly that Endowment officials have merely executed the mission they were assigned by Reagan and Congress...
...The Endowment, it should be remembered, grew out of the neoconservative critique of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy...
...Thus the Endowment's funding of moderate and conservative political parties of Latin America, groups rarely wanting for generous donors, should be cut off...
...Thus human rights groups the world over should be primary candidates for Endowment assistance...
...The brutal assassination of one of its leaders and her two-year-old son was called "an accident" by one Reagan administration official...
...The latest flap over the Endowment occurred in November when it was disclosed that NED had given $1.4 million to two right-wing groups in France...
...If the National Endowment for Democracy cannot understand that democracy begins with trusting democrats, it should be put out of business once and for all...
...suspiciously timid about democratic ideals at worst...
...Gershman consulted "several independent, expert sources" (who turned out to be four fellow neoconservatives) and exercised what he forthrightly called "supervisory responsibility...
...His record of "anticipating problems" is excellent...
...As the conference proceeded, the South Africans saw that Brown and the others were supporting their struggle, not because of its democratic character, but for its use in Cold War politics...
...The principles guiding NED's operations, and especially the undemocratic impulses that link these controversies, go unexamined...
...The Endowment's mission—"to strengthen democratic institutions around the world"—seems unobjectionable...
...q 148...
...This is the human rights organization that provided crucial assistance to the government prosecution in the trials of the Argentine high command...
...For example, NED helped pay for the distribution of the Polish Helsinki Watch Group's detailed and valuable human rights report...
...This courageous group of human rights activists might seem a natural for Endowment support...
...It was Brown who dispensed the $1.4 million to the right-wing groups in France...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
