In Southeast Asia, Activist Groups Become Major Force for Social Change

In a musty old villa on Street 240, Lao Mong Hay and his staff of 26 Cambodians--four of them security guards--play a high-stakes game as commandos for democratic reform. In their cross hairs are Cambodia’s tough-guy prime minister and the country’s tradition of human rights abuse.

Ask the bespectacled Hay what he thinks of the government and the words “elements of fascism” creep into his assessment. Prime Minister Hun Sen? “A sugar-coated communist” with little commitment to the ideals of a civil society, he replies.

Hay, head of the Khmer Institute for Democracy, knows that authorities wouldn’t have tolerated challenges on issues such as individual liberties and a fair judiciary--let alone his own blunt remarks--during Pol Pot’s murderous rule, and his mission is still not without personal risk.

“This,” he says, “is my obligation as a citizen.”

Across Southeast Asia, from Indonesia to the Philippines, the emergence of thousands of activist groups such as Hay’s represents a grass-roots awakening of social conscience that is affecting how countries deal with everything from human rights to the environment and child labor.

Their rapid growth is particularly noteworthy because volunteerism has never played a significant role in Southeast Asia, where Confucian values teach families to take care of themselves and leave the world to pretty much look out for itself.

Liberal, issue-oriented and nonprofit, the groups are known by the acronym NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations. Once little more than a collection of tattered charities, the domestic NGOs--which operate in the shadow of widely known, well-financed international groups such as Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and World Vision International--have become paladins, giving the poor a voice, refugees a hope and social activists a cause to rally around.

In Thailand, a coalition of NGOs known as the Assembly of the Poor has been staging daily demonstrations for months in the capital, Bangkok, and other cities to vent its anger over myriad environmental and economic issues: the Pak Moon dam in northwestern Thailand that is robbing fishermen of their livelihood by destroying 80% of the fish that once lived in Moon River; the forced eviction of villagers from new national parks; a planned natural gas pipeline from Malaysia to Thailand that will displace thousands of Thais.

“If it wasn’t for the NGOs, we’d have no say at all in the pipeline project,” said Prasert Khamchoo, a Thai farmer who has attended several protests and public hearings.

In the Philippines, an NGO known as ReachOut has taken on the powerful Roman Catholic Church in a campaign to promote the use of condoms. In Malaysia, Marina Mahathir, the daughter of the country’s homophobic prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has become a leading NGO activist to combat AIDS and gay-bashing. In Indonesia, a group of professional women and homemakers called the Voice of Concerned Mothers demonstrated for cheaper milk powder in 1998, helping spark student protests that brought down long-ruling President Suharto.

Not long ago, when these countries were governed directly or indirectly by the military, such activism would have been unthinkable. But today, in an era of increased participatory democracy, reduced military involvement in political affairs and growing public demand for reforms, governments are listening. And the NGOs’ clout is growing, partly because they speak to issues of concern to Western donors with billions of dollars to disburse.

Thailand, for instance, has delayed the start of construction on the Malaysian pipeline and is talking about changes to the Pak Moon dam. The use of condoms in the Philippines has soared, as a means of both birth control and AIDS prevention. The Cambodian government has yielded to environmental NGOs and promised to reduce logging concessions in forests. Labor conditions in Vietnam’s garment and shoe factories have improved after public agitation for change.

“In the past, people were afraid to speak out,” Hay said. “They had nowhere to channel their grievances. So if they had a grievance in Cambodia, they went to the jungle and took up arms. Now, instead of going to the jungle, they come to town and protest in front of the National Assembly.”

The burgeoning of domestic NGOs has done nothing to dim the prominence or presence of better-known international NGOs. A U.N. report estimates the number of international NGOs at 29,000, and the total of domestic NGOs may be two or three times that figure.

Few observers question the importance of the international NGOs in the developing world, whether they’re providing artificial limbs for land-mine victims, as the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation does in Cambodia, or distributing food to starving East Timorese, as World Vision International did last year even before peacekeepers had secured the territory.

International NGOs also have played an important role in the emergence of domestic NGOs. Because their agendas usually include human rights and social issues, even if their mission statements do not, they move the dialogue with host governments forward. They can, in effect, clear the path of political land mines and give the upstart activists space to maneuver and take root.

For all NGOs, the competition for funding is fierce. (The organizations raised $5.5 billion from private donors in 1997, a U.N. report says.) Small domestic NGOs are sometimes accused of hatching programs based on the availability of money rather than on need. And the giant international groups often appear uncomfortably corporate, with media divisions, high-powered fund-raising arms and well-paid executives. The end result: The nongovernmental organizations are less independent than their name would imply.

“Money can absolutely skewer the pursuit of an NGO’s goal,” said Lady Borton, a rural development expert in Hanoi with Quaker Service-Vietnam, which doesn’t accept U.S. government grants.

“You have a small NGO. Then big money comes in. The NGO gets into big marketing, and the motivation is destroyed,” Borton said. “You need money to work on your projects, but chasing the money can be quite insidious.”

International NGOs as a group also have drawn criticism for paying high salaries that throw local economies out of balance, for perpetuating their own jobs and missions and for creating dependency. In Cambodia, for instance, donors and NGOs have virtually taken over funding for education, social services and rural development, leaving the government free to devote its resources to defense and security, the Cambodia Development Resource Institute notes.

“NGOs can have a destabilizing influence,” said Bill Herod of the NGO Forum on Cambodia, a coalition of 60 local and international organizations. “Schoolteachers with passable English earning $30 a month can get jobs as drivers for NGOs for $150, $180 a month. Then they’re in the NGO mix and they couldn’t get out if they wanted to because they’re dependent on the salary.

“All these four-wheel-drive vehicles you see NGOs driving around Phnom Penh cost $30,000 or $35,000. You can build three schools for that. Frankly, I think NGOs have gotten a little big for their britches. They need to be more responsive to the people who are putting in the money and more in touch with the realities of Cambodia.”

Increasingly, Western governments find it more cost-effective to dispense aid through NGOs, rather than to carry out programs themselves. Doctors Without Borders, for instance, receives 46% of its income from government sources, and USAID, the U.S. government’s developmental body, regularly passes funds to the Asia Foundation for distribution to NGOs. Much of the food supplied to needy nations by the World Food Program, a U.N. body, is actually distributed by NGOs.

“Taking government money robs NGOs of a lot of independence,” said a World Bank official who requested anonymity. “The idealism that marked the early days of NGOs has gotten tangled up with commercial and political issues. Obviously, if you depend on USAID for your funding, you are, in some respects at least, an instrument of American foreign policy.”

This link makes some governments, such as Vietnam’s, uneasy. Vietnam allows no domestic NGOs, maintaining that anything they could offer would only duplicate services provided by the Communist Party. In 1992, the party even considered banning all NGOs because it worried that their influence with the people was greater than that of the government. Today, more than 350 international NGOs operate in Vietnam with Hanoi’s blessing.

“To tell you the truth, it was difficult working for an NGO in the early ‘90s,” said Le Thi Hoai, country director of Quaker Service-Vietnam. “If you said ‘nongovernmental,’ people thought you meant anti-government and they were scared to talk to you.

“That has passed now. And if you go into the field, where I spend most of my time, where people are so poor they have nothing, you can see our work is really helping. People can send their children to school now; they can have a small business. Maybe they have a cow or a few chickens. They have more hope for the future than they did before. For me, that’s the best reward.”