"Fake" aid agencies discredit NGO sector

At Mercy Humanity Organisation, at least 10 sheikhs and other community leaders are packed into a small office brainstorming where they can get more money for the 300 orphans their organisation helps. Even though the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is responsible for orphans, these particular children are now taken care of by his aid group, Sheikh Hussein Taha Saleh Almula told IRIN. He said his group has given the children food and shelter for several months. "Now we have a huge number of handicapped children who need help. We will cooperate with anyone who can help us help these people," Almula said. Mercy has 16 branches across the country and a long list of achievements printed up on a fact sheet. It is supported by a group in South Korea and by some Muslim groups, including Muslim Aid from Sudan, Almula said. But the sheikh is also head of Almula Company for General Trade and Construction. He readily agrees that his business card shows him as a jack-of-all-trades, but points out that he is bound by Islam to give a certain percent of his work to charity. Those who are involved with charity work have to be trustworthy, Almula said. But in the end, only people in the community can decide which aid agencies do good work and which are charlatans, he added. "There is a kind of corruption, which makes it worse for the ones trying to do humanitarian work," he said. "Many false aid agencies are active - they took money from people and promised them things they couldn't provide." Thousands of newly created aid agencies that have registered in the past year and a half appear not to be working at all, Dawood Pasha, director-general at the Ministry of State for NGOs, told IRIN. In fact, most of them don't even have an office - they exist only on paper, Pasha said. "If each organisation we knew about did only one project, we would have a good situation," Pasha said. "Now, many people have no confidence in these organisations, because there are many of them that do no work." Some of the "fake" aid agencies were apparently just conning people by taking their money and giving them worthless titles to pieces of government land, Pasha said. The "con artists" who took the money didn't own the land and didn't have any right to sell it, he said. Such groups are now under investigation, Pasha said. "Iraqis should monitor these organisations. We can't do it alone," he said. Pasha declined to give the names of agencies under investigation. He said most Iraqis had no confidence in such groups because they never saw any work being done by these so-called aid workers. "NGOs are a new phenomenon for Iraq. After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, many people heard there were donations or money coming from outside Iraq, so they tried to get it," Pasha said. But fake aid agencies aren't the only problem in the aid community, Maha Saleh, vice-chairman of the Iraqi Society of Female Victims of Violence, told IRIN. Many new aid agencies are also affiliated to political groups, which often keeps them from helping people with different political or religious beliefs, Saleh said. In addition, many aid agency officials are interested only in taking trips to other countries and getting training, not in helping people, Saleh said. "They take money, buy computers, make an Internet café, then they don't do anything," Saleh said.