Local NGO sector expanding

Until just a few short months ago, Abdul Hussein Mohammed was a political prisoner in one of Saddam Hussein’s notorious prisons. Mohammed felt so strongly about his detention, that when he was released this spring, he formed the Independent Political Prisoners Institution to draw attention to the plight of former prisoners and help them get jobs and compensation. Saddam Hussein released an estimated 100,000 prisoners, many of them political prisoners, just before the Coalition military came into Iraq. "Before, we just wanted to be free from the government," Mohammed told IRIN. "But we want to help former political prisoners. Now, we will find jobs for them." Mohammed’s group is one of many local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that has sprung up in recent months. He wants to lobby the new Iraq government, which has not yet been completely formed, to make sure prisoners will always have basic human rights in the future. Iraq’s Governing Council, a group of appointed leaders, recently named several ministers to head various government offices, including a newly created ministry to deal with human rights. Campaigning NGOs with human rights or any kind of political or sectarian agenda were ruthlessly put down under Saddam Hussein, now, despite the political uncertainty that pervades Iraq such groups are beginning to make their presence felt. Members of a former teacher’s union mingled with a nascent women’s group at a meeting on Tuesday held to coordinate the new burgeoning local NGO sector as well as humanitarian projects. All the people in the room wanted funding for their groups, even though many did not know what they wished to do to help the people of Iraq, said Ester Lauferova, the non-governmental group coordinator for Human Rights and Transitional Justice, an international human rights group. Lauferova coordinated the meeting. "Groups are coming to our office, and they’re not necessarily NGOs," Lauferova said. Non-governmental groups never existed in Saddam-run Iraq before, since all such groups were part of or affiliated to the government, Steve Epstein, who works at the US-funded Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI), told IRIN. OTI is trying to sort out viable projects from ones that make no sense or have a commercial objective. Lauferova and others are trying to teach Iraqis keen to develop their country through local NGOs how to explain their projects to potential donors and how to write funding proposals. At least 33 local NGOs have sprung up in Iraq in recent months, based on information from Lauferova and others. At the same time, numerous international aid groups such as the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), Handicap International and Oxfam have sent international staff out of the country following a truck bomb on United Nations headquarters two weeks ago. Such organisations may now do more to help boost the local NGO sector to enable Iraqis to take on a larger share of the work usually performed by international staff members.