NGOs, the Iranian way

Last Sunday, Omid Memarian posted his Op/Ed regarding the $ 75 million issue on his blog. And when talking about Iranian NGOs, he said: "The traditional sector is religious, well-organized and quite cohesive. Financed by the regime itself, it has access to far more extensive resources than the meager sums being offered to the modern civil society by the US, and it encompasses the most passionate supporters of the regime."

Sadly, it is a known fact that outside of the country, Iranian civil society is either represented by the very properly veiled, if not tchadored, ladies of the Network of Women's NGOs in the IRI, one of which, I understand, has a specialty in filming all the others... or by the Organization for Defending Victims of Violence, whose head once admitted having been a former interrogator.

I was recently talking to the Brussels representative of a major human rights NGO, and this person was telling me that the EU is finding itself in a "catch 22" position: there are funds allocated to helping Iranian NGOs and yet the "genuine" NGOs refuse this money. So the EU ends-up funding the likes of ODVV for lack of a better choice.

NGOs jeopardizing their already precarious situation by receiving funds from abroad is not an issue limited to Iran. There are plenty of such cases throughout the world. The most recently publicized one was Russia; Egyptian NGOs have been struggling with the issue for many years, etc. There are ways to go about it, but perhaps this Iranian sense of being "unique" takes us back to another blogger's recent post...