National Endowment for Democracy

 

About NED

 

National Endowment for Democracy is one of hundreds non-governmental organizations in the USA providing humanitarian and financial aid. Still as it is said on their web-site they get their funding from the Congress. That is why we highly doubt that they are not influenced by the US government, so they have to do what they are asked to do. This organization claims to be fully independent from the government as board members are not selected by the President.

The goal of NED is to promote democracy in more than 90 countries in the world.

 

Actions of NED

 

It is important to say, that NED just like the USAID has different departments – African, Asian, Central and Eastern European, Eurasian, Latin American and Caribbean, Middle Eastern and North African.

In Ukraine NED fostered freedom of the press, defending journalists, and informing citizens about the country’s direction. In Belarus NED increased support to programs promoting human rights, freedom and information, political party building and the preservation of civil society. In Russia NED protected freedoms of assembly and associations in December 2011, in Georgia they helped in organizing elections of 2012.

We might say, that the goal of “providing democracy” is very wide and can include a lot of pitfalls. For instance, under the cover of providing democracy NED can spread the American influence which will make the USA even more powerful country.

 

Criticism

 

Some researchers say that in Russia NED supports a popular oppositionist Alexey Navalny who is accused of corruption and he is serving a sentence now. All of us remember what happened on Manezhnaya Square couple of years ago, we were close to the revolution (which happened in Ukraine in 2014 and was sponsored by USAID) which was promoted by NED and similar organizations. Moreover, we can find out and interesting consequence – in 2010 NED provided $183,900 to support the democracy in Lybia, and the revolution broke out there the next year.

In 2002 NED provided $36,500 to the Russian Center of Developing Human Rights in order to evaluate the law about the conscription and whether it complies with human rights standards. So, we can conclude that the American government wants to cancel the conscription in Russia which will reduce the number of soldiers and will make Russia weaker militarily.

 

Conclusion

 

To conclude, we can say, that NED provide democracy not only because they want to help developing (and even developed) countries but, to a greater extent, to spread American influence all over the world in order to have the leverage over the majority of countries and to dominate in the geopolitical sense.