NGOs Or WGOs?

While we were opening the World Social Forum in Karachi last weekend withvirtuoso performances of sufi music and speeches, the country's rulers weremarking the centenary of the Muslim League [the party that created Pakistan andhas ever since been passed on from one bunch of rogues to another till now it isin the hands of political pimps who treat it like a bordello] by gifting theorganisation to General Pervaiz Musharaf, the country's uniformed ruler.

The secular opposition leaders, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, who used tocompete with each other to see who could amass more funds while in power, areboth in exile. To return home would mean to face arrest for corruption. Neitheris in the mood for martyrdom or relinquishing control of their organizations.Meanwhile, the religious parties are happily implementing neo-liberal policiesin the North-West Frontier province that is under their control. Incapable ofcatering to the real needs of the poor they concentrate their fire on women andthe godless liberals who defend them.

The military is so secure in its rule and the official politicians so uselessthat 'civil society' is booming. Private TV channels, like NGOs, have mushroomedand most views are permissible (I was interviewed for an hour by one of these onthe "fate of the world communist movement") except a frontal assaulton religion or the military and its networks that govern the country. If civilsociety posed any real threat to the elite, the plaudits it receives wouldrapidly turn to menace.

It was, thus, no surprise that the WSF, too, had been permitted andfacilitated by the local administration in Karachi. It is now part of theglobalized landscape and helps backward rulers feel modern. The event itself wasno different from the others. Present are several thousand people, mainly fromPakistan, but with a sprinkling of delegates from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,South Korea and a few other countries.

Absent was any representation from China's burgeoning peasant and workersmovements or its critical intelligentsia. Iran, too, was unrepresented as wasMalaysia. The Israeli enforcers who run the Jordanian administration harassed aPalestinian delegation. Only a handful of delegates managed to get through thecheckpoints and reach Karachi. The huge earthquake in Pakistan last year haddisrupted many plans and the organizers were not able to travel and persuadepeople elsewhere in the continent to come. Otherwise, insisted the organisers,the voices of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Fallujah would have been heard.

The fact that it happened at all in Pakistan was positive. People here arenot used to hearing different voices and views. The Forum enabled many fromrepressed social layers and minority religions to assemble make their voicesheard: persecuted Christians from the Punjab, Hindus from Sindh, women fromeverywhere told heart-rending stories of discrimination and oppression.

Present too was a sizeable class-struggle element: peasants fighting againstthe privatization of military farms in Okara, the fisher-folk from Sindh whoselivelihoods are under threat and who complained about the great Indus riverbeing diverted to deprive the common people of water they had enjoyed since thebeginning of human civilization thousands of years ago, workers from Baluchistancomplaining about military brutalities in the region.

Teachers who explained how the educational system in the country hadvirtually ceased to exist. The common people who spoke were articulate,analytical and angry, in polar contrast to the stale rhetoric of Pakistan'spolitical class. Much of what was said was broadcast on radio and televisionwith the main private networks---Geo, Hum and Indus--- vying with each other toensure blanket coverage.

And so the WSF like a big feel-good travelling road show came to Pakistan andwent. What will it leave behind? Very little, apart from goodwill and thefeeling that it has happened here. For the fact remains the elite dominates thatpolitics in the country. Little else matters. Small radical groups are doingtheir best, but there is no state-wide organisation or movement that speaks forthe dispossessed. The social situation is grim, despite the massaged statisticscirculated by the World Bank's Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

The NGOs are no substitute for genuine social and political movements. Theymay be NGOs in Pakistan but in the global scale they are WGOs (WesternGovernmental Organizations), their cash-flow conditioned by restricted agendas.It is not that some of them are not doing good work, but the overall effect ofthis has been to atomize the tiny layer of left and liberal intellectuals. Mostof these men and women (those who are not in NGOs are embedded in the privatemedia networks) struggle for their individual NGOs to keep the money coming;petty rivalries assumed exaggerated proportions; politics in the sense ofgrass-roots organisation is virtually non-existent. The Latin American model asemerging in the victories of Chavez and Morales is a far cry from Mumbai orKarachi.

Tariq Ali is author of the recently released Street Fighting Years(new edition) and, with David Barsamian, Speaking of Empires & Resistance.