I don't think Matas's essay will shut up fringe voices like Broadbent. But I think it should answer a lot of the questions that good faith reporters have been asking. And -- who knows? -- coming from a Liberal, it might even cause Michael Ignatieff to slowly back away from an organization that calls Israel a war criminal and funds a terrorist. Here it is:
What is the cause of the current controversy at Rights and Democracy? There is no doubt that there is a dispute. But what is the subject matter of the dispute?
A letter from the staff asks three Board members to resign because they have, according to the staff, been guilty of harassment. The charge of harassment is an invidious characterization of an activity. But what activity? To what, in neutral terms, is the complaint referring? And why is the complaint directed against only three Board members?
The staff letter complains that the performance evaluation committee of the Board treated the President unfairly because it sent its performance evaluation of the President to the Privy Council without first having given the President a copy and an opportunity to comment. This complaint, it should be noted, is different from the complaint of harassment and does not explain it.
The letter omits to mention a number of relevant facts. One is that the performance evaluation committee had obtained a legal opinion that its evaluation was a confidence of the Privy Council and could not be disclosed to the President. Second, the President nonetheless obtained a copy of the evaluation through an access to information request. Third, the committee had agreed to reconsider and amend its evaluation based on the comments the President had made after having seen the copy of the evaluation he had obtained through access to information. Fourth, the committee had made a number of changes based on these comments. Fifth, the President was free to write to the Privy Council himself to express any disagreement he might have with the evaluation as amended.
The staff, in a letter signed by communications director Charles Vallerand, takes the position that the present dispute is not a policy difference between the Board and the staff. Yet, the very first time I met the then Rights and Democracy President Remy Beauregard, (in Parliament at the launch of a book I co-authored with David Kilgour, to which Beauregard came in order to set up a briefing session between him and me) he referred to ideological differences within the Board and between a faction of the Board and the staff.
What were these ideological differences? And how is that they now seem to have disappeared? Or, put another way, why has the staff narrative shifted from ideological differences to a claim of harassment?
It is impossible to answer these questions without reference to the February 2009 grants to three organizations "to continue their documentation of human rights violations occurring in the Gaza strip". The three organizations are Al Haq, Al Mezan,, and B'Tselem. The grant for each was $10,000.00 Canadian. The grants came from funds not subject to Board approval, the urgent action and important opportunity funds.
The $30,000.00 spent was a small part of a multi-million dollar budget. Yet, they have led to the unravelling of the organization. The grants themselves were inappropriate for reasons I have set out in a separate memorandum. However, the problem was not so much the grants, as flawed as they were, as the manner in which Rights and Democracy handled them.
In a briefing session staff gave to Michael Van Pelt and me the day before our first Board meeting, we were told that Rights and Democracy does not receive and decide on unsolicited grant applications. Rather all applications for grants it awards are elicited by Rights and Democracy in pursuit of its own program objectives.
At the Finance and Audit Committee meetings following the awarding of the grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem, in response to questions about how the urgent action and important opportunities fund was being spent, the staff was initially not forthcoming. It took repeated queries at a sequence of meetings of the Finance and Audit Committee, as well as a number of e-mail exchanges, before the management provided information on the three grants, with all supporting documents, to the enquiring Board members.
The three Board members accused of harassment were those active in seeking the information about those grants. What the management, from their perspective, refers to as harassment must have seemed to the enquiring Board members to be no more than due diligence in the face of what they saw as stonewalling, coverup and runaround.
The Middle East, it should go without saying, is a political minefield where the ignorant are all too easily led astray. What distinguished the three enquiring Board members, aside from their diligence to attempt to pierce through generalities the staff provided about the urgent action and important opportunity fund, was their relative familiarity with Middle East politics. They knew as soon as they found out about them, without anyone having to explain it to them, that these grants should never have been made.
What is more, the staff disclosure of the three grants, at least initially, was not accompanied by an acknowledgement that something was amiss. Rather the staff produced a lengthy memorandum defending the grants.
The eventual disclosure of all relevant documents about the three grants, only after prolonged persistent inquiry by the investigating Board members, accompanied by a vigorous defense of what to the investigating Board members must have seemed indefensible, led to a breakdown in trust between these Board members and the management. If the management was hiding these three questionable grants from the Board, what else, the enquiring Board members must have wondered, were they hiding?
In particular, how was all the money being spent which Rights and Democracy had been sending to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and its own Geneva office? The United Nations is notoriously obsessed with beating up on Israel. Was the UN/Geneva money, like the three grants, being spent on that? In particular, was it being spent on the Durban review conference on racism held in Geneva which Canada had decided to boycott?
The management had an innocent explanation for the expenditure of the UN/Geneva office funds, that the money for Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was going to its program on national human rights institutions and that the money for its own Geneva office was going to host visiting NGO delegations coming to participate in the United Nations Human Rights Council Universal Period Review. But, in light of the obfuscation which preceded the eventual disclosure of the three grants Al Haq, Al Mezam and B'Tselem, could that innocent explanation be trusted?
Persistent inquiry, in the case of the three grants, in the face of benign management generalities, led to a discovery of an improper activity. The lesson of that experience to the enquiring Board members presumably was not to accept benign generalities in other areas as well, but rather to make further enquiries.
The management, needless to say, does not have the same distrust of itself that the foot dragging over disclosure of the three grants had generated amongst the enquiring Board members. So these persistent enquiries in other areas seemed to the staff to be excessive.
This explanation, though, only gets us so far. Why the shifting narrative? Why was there at first a dispute over the three grants, and then there was not?
One answer was the manner in which the dispute was conducted. It is easy in retrospect to go over any conversation and think of better phrasing. Normally people will not care about the infelicities of verbal exchange. However, once there is a breach of trust, small details loom large.
I have had an opportunity to talk to both sides in this dispute. What struck me was the suspicion of bad faith on one side as much as the other, the spinning of conspiracy theories, the exaggerated focus on incidental comments.
Another explanation for the shifting narrative was what happened at the Board meeting of January 7th, my first this time round. At that meeting, I moved a motion repudiating the three grants, with the detailed memorandum I had written in support.
Because it was not written far enough in advance to be translated for the Board meeting, I spoke, at the meeting, to the substance of the memorandum, taking advantage of the simultaneous translation provided for the meeting. The motion passed handily, with Remy Beauregard in favour, abandoning his previous position in support of the grants.
While, as I have noted, many to whom I have talked about the present dispute assume bad faith on the part of the people with whom they disagree, I will make the opposite assumption, that everyone, including Remy Beauregard, was operating in good faith. That good faith assumption means that, when Beauregard supported the three grants, he believed that they were proper and that, when he voted against the grants, he had changed his mind and come to view them as improper.
One explanation for his shift was tactical, that Beauregard changed his views because of the shifting composition and majority in the Board. The good faith explanation, in contrast, is to accept that Beauregard genuinely believed what he said at the January 7th Board meeting, that the information he had up to the Board meeting led him to believe that the three grants made sense but that the additional information about Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem presented at the Board meeting made him realize that the grants were improperly made.
His words at the Board meeting were: "We could have done our homework better". Beauregard died of a heart attack the night after he made that statement. A good faith explanation of his behaviour means that Beauregard went to bed the night he died with the realization that those three grants, which he had spent so much time and effort defending, which, within the confines of the management and the Board he had staked his personal reputation, were wrongly made.
So here we have two directly contrasting explanations for the conflict. One explanation is harassment by three Board members. A second is due diligence by these same Board members in the face of first a runaround and then a defense of the indefensible.
But there is a third. Tempers are frayed; emotions are heightened; perspectives are blurred. Yet, there is an argument to be made that the present dispute has little to do with how the Board has treated the staff or how the staff has treated the Board, and a whole lot do with the nature of the institution, that what we are seeing is the eruption into broad daylight of hidden but inherent contradictions embedded within the structure and mission of the organization.
Rights and Democracy was established to give grants to third world NGOS which would promote rights and democracy. It was set up at arm's length from government in order to avoid giving the impression of political interference in foreign countries which direct Canadian government granting to foreign NGOs might give.
The institution's governing statute sets out six particular powers of Rights and Democracy as well as a general power. Five of the six detailed powers are suggested techniques of operation. The five specific directions for spending the statute proposes are first, technical assistance, training programs and advisory services; second, information and data centres; third, research; fourth, seminars, workshops and other meetings; and fifth, existing organizations, institutions and agencies. All five suggested techniques are suggested directions for grants, suggestions about what the institution could give money for. The obligation in the statute to "carry out its activities through existing organizations, institutions and agencies" is particularly striking.
The statute does not to appear to contemplate that the institution spend money on itself for human rights advocacy work. That, in any case, is a matter of common sense. Human rights advocacy of a government funded agency has neither the credibility nor the resonance of human rights advocacy by individuals speaking out on their own or through their organizations.
The statute specifically limits spending the Parliamentary appropriation for the institution on programs and activities for the benefit of developing countries. When Parliament stated that its appropriations must be used only for the purpose of supporting programs and activities for the benefit of developing countries, it is most unlikely Parliamentarians had in mind that the money be spent primarily on staff of a Canadian organization who in turn support programs and activities in developing countries. Spending the Parliamentary appropriation primarily on a Canadian organization defeats rather than realizes the intentions of Parliament.
If one looks at the Parliamentary intent and compares it with Rights and Democracy as it now is, two problems are manifest. One is that is not clear that the original intent still makes sense. The other is that Rights and Democracy has evolved in a way to frustrate that original intent.
Since the enactment of the legislation creating Rights and Democracy, there has been an evolution in the way human rights NGOS are viewed. One reason is the NGO Forum against Racism held in Durban South Africa in August 2001.
That Forum was a cataclysmic event in the NGO world. It presented a whole new experience, a landmark for the NGO world, an event of significance beyond the confines of the fight against racism.
The Durban NGO forum was plagued by a group of NGOs who had a political agenda, not a human rights agenda, and who were willing to stop at nothing to realize that agenda. Goodwill was not at hand to put order into the disarray. Rather, the inexperience of the organizers, and the absence of both clear rules and institutional structures meant that those with a political agenda were able to turn the NGO Forum away from human rights and to their own agenda.
It became clear from the Durban NGO Forum, that the nongovernmental world is no holier that the governmental world. Powerlessness does not sanctify. What distinguishes governments from nongovernmental organizations, aside from money and power, is the range of interests. Governments are multi-faceted, inevitably trying to juggle a number of different interests or causes simultaneously. Nongovernmental organizations have the luxury of specialization. They can and do devote themselves to only one cause or a small number of causes.
However, there is nothing inherent in the worthiness of the causes of non-governmental organizations. Non-governmental organizations are as likely to preach human rights violations as human rights, as likely to resort to violence and incitement to violence as governments are. Non-governmental organizations are, after all, like governments, just people, and often the same people on their way into or out of government.
Nongovernmental human rights organizations have the luxury of an exclusive focus on human rights that governments can not afford. Nongovernmental political organizations are more easily obsessed by the monomania of their political causes than governments. Governments are brought face to face with reality when they attempt to put their ideas into practice. Nongovernmental political ideologists can live in a fantasy world of their own imaginations.
There has been a tendency for nongovernmental human rights organizations to focus on abuses by governments. The explanation for this focus is, in part, historical. The nongovernmental human rights movement arose during the Cold War when governments in the East were totalitarian and client governments of the West were authoritarian. Governments were strong and opposition groups were weak.
Now, big brother has been replaced by little brother. Instead of communist regimes in the East and national security regimes in the West, we have state collapse and fragmentation, free for alls where war lords, terrorists and the mafia reign, too little government rather than too much.
The nongovernmental human rights world has been slow to adapt to this changing reality. Human rights NGOs are so used to mobilizing civil society to call governments to account that they find it hard to grapple with threats to human rights from the nongovernmental world. Human rights NGOs have seen other nongovernmental organizations as potential allies in the struggle for human rights, rather than potential threats to respect for human rights.
Human rights NGOs have learned to be suspicious of governments that mouth the human rights vocabulary and do little else. Governmental human rights hypocrisy is easily identified and condemned. These same human rights NGOs have been far less likely to scrutinize the incantation of human rights platitudes by political nongovernmental organizations.
The naivete and misdirection of human rights NGOs have created an opportunity for political NGOs. Political activists who have little regard for human rights use human rights discourse to discredit and delegitimize their opponents. They turn to human rights NGOs to endorse their cause, asking human rights NGOs to condemn their opponents as human rights violators. Human rights NGOs, as often as not, have been blind to this political manipulation and have bought into the agenda of those political movements which use the proper human rights vocabulary.
Political NGOs are sometimes nongovernmental in name only. Human rights NGOs are reluctant to take money from governments, for fear that it might compromise their independence. Political NGOs are not as reluctant, and are often financed by sympathetic governments. GONGOs, government organized NGOs, have been a traditional feature of communist regimes, but they proliferate wherever repression is found.
The turmoil of NGO forums, the naivete of human rights NGOs, and the fixations of politicized NGOs all came together in Durban to produce a witches brew. The atmosphere was poisoned and so was the result. After that Forum, it was impossible to look at the NGO world in the same way as Parliament had done when Rights and Democracy was created.
A second change in context since the enactment of the Rights and Democracy legislation is the suspicion repressive governments bring to foreign financed NGOs. The various NGO led revolutions in dictatorial countries has taught perpetrators a lesson.
The October 2000 revolution in Serbia, the 2003 rose revolution in Georgia, the 2004 orange revolution in Ukraine, the 2005 tulip revolution in the Krygyz republic, the 2005 Cedar revolution in Lebanon, in all of which foreign financed NGOs participated, have led perpetrators to be wary of this financing. The notion that Canada might be seen to be independent of NGOs it finances through an arm's length organization has become illusory in light of the heightened suspicion of that sort of funding. The political objective of appearance of non-interference intended by the arm's length relationship is no longer attainable through a structure like Rights and Democracy.
One could question the mission of Rights and Democracy as devised by Parliament, even if the organization stayed within the statutory vision. But it has not. And its straying, rather than correcting the problems the statutory vision now poses, has made the working of the organization even more problematic.
The staff and management of Rights and Democracy has all but abandoned the original Parliamentary intent to "carry out its activities through existing organizations, institutions and agencies". Canadian law requires a charitable foundation to spend 4 1/2% of its investment assets and 80% of receipted gifts in the previous year on grants to qualified donees. Rights and Democracy does not spend anywhere near 80% of its funds on existing organizations, institutions and agencies.
There are, to be sure, NGOs to whom Rights and Democracy money goes. But, none of this is simply the awarding of grants amongst applications. All spending today by Rights and Democracy on NGOs results from elicited requests. The organization devises a program and finds NGO contractors to deliver it. NGOs who receive grants today from Rights and Democracy are doing what Rights and Democracy wants, on contract. That, of course, made the grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan, and B'Tselem in the minds of the opposing Board members particularly appalling.
There is much human rights work to be done which meets with overall consensus. Whether programs are delivered by a Government of Canada department, by Rights and Democracy, or by the NGO world on grants, matters little. Arguing over the agent of delivery is a quibble when the program is incontestably worthwhile.
The reason the fuss about the small grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem loomed so large is these grants should not have been made. How they came to be made mattered in a way that the spending of Rights and Democracy money on uncontroversial matters did not. The making of these grants raised questions not just about these NGOs but about Rights and Democracy itself.
The letter of Charles Valleyrand to the Globe was striking not just for its shifting narrative, but also for its claim of independence. The author writes that the institution is by law independent. But independence of whom, from whom? The original vision was that the third world NGOs which received grants from Rights and Democracy should be independent from the Government of Canada. This has been perverted into a notion that the staff of Rights and Democracy should be independent from its Board.
I have come across this notion of independence of the staff from the Board not just in the letter from Charles Vallerand, but also in conversations with others connected to the institution. Indeed, what must have seemed to the three inquiring Board members to be stonewalling and coverup may well have been for the staff an attempt to protect what it thought of as its independence. Yet, this form of independence makes no sense at all.
The Government of Canada should indeed take the NGO world as it finds it and not try to manipulate it through money. But that is different from saying that it should behave that way towards its own devised and wholly financed creature. It is, on the contrary, bizarre to suggest that the Government of Canada should fully fund an institution to hire people off the street to run their own political agenda in the name of human rights, without the Government and its appointed Board raising so much as a peep.
It is this issue of independence which explains why three Board members in particular became the target of the complaint of the staff. The three are Aurel Braun, Jacques Gauthier, and Elliot Tepper. They are respectively the chair, vice chair and chair of the Finance and Audit Committee. They are, in other words, the leadership of the Board. They are people with distinguished careers and different personalities.
The allegation that any one of them, let alone all three, was engaged in harassment of anyone is inherently implausible. The fact that this complaint is directed to the leadership of the Board is itself an indication that the three were simply carrying out what they saw to be their duties as Board members.
Indeed, the complaint letter elsewhere indicates this accusing the three of "a complete misunderstanding of their roles as directors". What did the staff think the role of directors should be and why did they think the leadership of the Board had misunderstood that role? This appears to be the nub of the dispute. The staff thought that the institution should function independently from its Board of Directors. The Board leadership thought otherwise.
This is why the grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem became so significant. The issue of staff independence from the Board was immaterial for projects on which the Board and staff agreed. The issue flared up only when there was a gap between Board and staff appreciation of a project.
The staff and the Board have been two slowly moving trains facing each other on the same track. At some point a collision was inevitable. The Board was well aware of the politicization of elements of the human rights NGO movement which the 2001 Durban NGO World Forum on Racism had highlighted and was determined to prevent Rights and Democracy from being complicit in it. The staff, moving in the opposite direction, morphed the Parliamentary vision of third world NGOs acting independently from the Canadian government which funded them into a vision of staff acting independently from their own board of directors.
If the three grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan and B'Tselem were an aberration, one could have said, let's forget about them and move on. But they were not. The problem the grants posed had existed for years.
Rights and Democracy used to have a Middle East programme which the Board terminated in 1998 while I was a member of the Board last time round. (I had previously been a Board member from 1997 to 2003.) One reason we terminated the programme was that it was generating precisely the problems the present three grants have generated.
Though in 1998 the anti-Zionist abuse of human rights reporting, standards and mechanisms to demonize and delegitimize Israel had not reached the fever pitch it has today assumed, it was even then part of the arsenal of anti-Zionist weaponry. It was apparent to the Board in 1998 that the Middle East programme had been corrupted by this anti-Zionist agenda.
Despite this termination, Warren Allmand, then President, without Board approval, sent two letters to Bill Graham the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, in April 2002, purportedly on behalf of Rights and Democracy. One letter expressed shock at Canada's voting against one of the many anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Another was an anti-Israel diatribe full of the usual blather condemning Israel for violating virtually every international crime known to humanity for defending itself against Hezbollah terrorist attacks from Lebanon. On becoming aware of these letters, I wrote to Bill Graham pointing out that I was a member of the Board and disagreeing with what Allmand wrote.
The problem resurfaced during the presidency of Jean Louis Roy, this time through grants in 2003 to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, between 2003 and 2005 to the International Women's House in the West Bank and in 2007 to the St. Iyves Society legal aid for Palestinians programme. None of these funding efforts was a repeal of the Board decision of 1998. All were circumventions of that decision by staff who used discretionary funds to ride their own hobby horse.
These grants attracted the attention of NGO Monitor which wrote:
"ICHRDD (International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development)'s campaign to promote 'democratic institutions in developing areas' has been used to justify a strongly pro‑Palestinian and anti‑Israel political agenda. The organization has approved funding grants for a number of projects conducted by very politicized recipients, including the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group and the International Women's House in Hares."
The grants to Al Haq, Al Mezan, and B'Tselem were the most flagrant and, until then, the most recent episode in an historically entrenched pattern of behaviour. This behaviour was far from particular to the presidency of Remy Beauregard. Though Beauregard would have brought his own views and personality to this phenomenon, he inherited it. He appears to be have been whipsawed between a staff insistent on running their own political agenda and a Board determined not to let it happen.
Moreover the problem persists even after his death. The staff took down from the website a message of condolence for the death of Remy Beauregard from the chair of the Board and placed on the website a message of condolence from Al Haq's General Director, Shawan Jabarin, a person determined by the Israel Supreme Court to be a senior activist in The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated by Canada to be a terrorist organization.
Where does this leave Rights and Democracy? If this were just a matter of hot tempers, tempers could cool; time would heal. If this were just a matter of some misspoken words, apologies might remedy the rudeness. If this were just a matter of the wrong people in the Board or staff, changes in the composition of the Board or staff would resolve the matter.
However, if the problem lies with Rights and Democracy itself, then resolution of the problem is not so simple. Independence of a government created and fully financed operation from a government appointed board makes no sense. But once the institution does nothing but run its own program, once the government finances the operation entirely and directs it through its board appointees, why should it exist at all? Why should it not just be folded into a government department? Does Rights and Democracy as it has become serve any purpose whatsoever, aside from delivering non-controversial programs which could be delivered in a myriad of different ways?
A crisis situation, where people are angry and upset, is no time to answer these questions. They should be put off for another day. But if answering these questions is necessary to resolve the crisis, it would be a mistake to gravitate to resignations or firings, which are likely to prolong the anger and the hurt, and produce no solution.
We do not have to decide today what is to become of Rights and Democracy. But unless we have identified correctly the problem which Rights and Democracy now faces, we can not hope for a solution.
