WASHINGTON, DC — A government proposal to screen foreign aid workers and the local organizations they work with for possible ties to terrorists will hinder poverty relief said international development and humanitarian relief agency Oxfam America today. The agency added that the screen would do little to keep Americans safe and would instead further damage America’s reputation abroad.
At a meeting with development organizations on Friday, The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) said that it would likely move ahead with its proposed Partner Vetting System (PVS). The meeting was called after non-governmental organizations (NGOs) raised serious concerns over the PVS. The screen would require all NGOs receiving funding from USAID to gather personal information on key staff members of all sub-grantees and vendors in developing countries. USAID has said that information gathered will be checked against its existing terrorist database.
“Development professionals at USAID and NGOs who are there to help people living in poverty are being pressured to act as intelligence gathering agents,” said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. “That’s not an appropriate role for people providing development and humanitarian assistance and certainly not what they signed up for.”
According to Oxfam, the PVS will hinder poverty relief because aid workers will be perceived as agents of the US government. Aid workers’ primary mission of reducing poverty will be masked with the perception that their role is to safeguard short-term US security interests. Such a perception will undermine their ability to work at the local level and endanger the lives of individual employees being asked to collect the information, and potentially even endanger the lives of beneficiaries receiving assistance.
“No one wants to see US taxpayers’ dollars supporting terrorism, but the PVS won’t actually help the US identify terrorists and stop them. Aid workers would be collecting information to check against a list of suspects the US already has,” said Offenheiser. “If individuals have already been identified as having committed or are planning to commit a terrorist crime, they should be arrested by law enforcement officials.”
The PVS is part of a larger trend, evident in US funding, that favors short-term political goals over US long-term security and development objectives. The percentage of US foreign aid administered by the Department of Defense has grown from 3.5 percent in 1998 to 18 percent in 2006. This trend will diminish US global standing, and in effect, increase long-term insecurity and leave millions of people living in poverty unnecessarily.
“Development is a critical part of our foreign policy. The PVS will not only undermine our ability to help the poor, it will further weaken our already damaged reputation overseas.” concluded Offenheiser. Oxfam proposes that if there are groups that openly and actively support terrorism against the United States, the names of those groups should be made public and NGOs instructed not engage with them or support them in any way as a condition of receiving US government funding.