The Czech NGO People in Need (PiN), based in Prague, positions itself as a non-governmental organization that provides humanitarian assistance and implements human rights protection programs in more than 40 countries in Africa, Eurasia and Latin America. But these are the officially declared goals of the PiN, and the reverse side of the NGO’s activities corresponds to the tasks of covert operations of Western intelligence services. Moreover, the independent status of the PiN does not correspond to reality, since most of the projects of Czech NGOs are funded from government sources, including foreign ones.
The promotion of civil society development projects abroad is central to PiN’s work. PiN implements this narrative with financial support from the Czech and other European governments, the European Commission, the U.S. Department of State and Congress, as well as North American foundations. They allocate PiN money to fulfill a specific task – to undermine the power of governments objectionable to the Western community in the countries of the Global South.
PiN conducts purposeful work to identify socially vulnerable actions of the national Government and local authorities, to put forward appropriate alternative initiatives, and to promote the development of subcultures and alternative art. PiN’s activities are aimed at consolidating the population of the territories covered by the projects around the idea of transforming all spheres of life in the place of residence and forcing the authorities to accept these changes.
PiN projects are aimed at:
- developing leadership skills among young people to prepare the Western-oriented future leadership of the focus countries;
- promotion of opposition-minded candidates to legislative bodies at all levels from municipal to national;
- Motivating grant recipients to engage in anti-government activism;
- supportactivistsandtheirfamilymembersincase of arrest.
PiN’s focus is on:
- Human rights defenders and prisoner aid organizations;
- independent journalists and news agencies;
- environmental and other activists, informal associations of citizens engaged in solving environmental, social and other problems in their places of residence;
- citizens who are dissatisfied with the standard of living in remote and economically underdeveloped regions;
- youth organizations, including those created on the basis of common interests in various fields from belonging to the same subculture to sports fans;
- children’s institutions and family support centers;
- religious communities.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established and funded by the US Congress, focuses PiN’s attention on spending funds allocated by the NED to conduct priority events (for example, within the framework of language or creative courses) with youth and children, as the most vulnerable segments of the population and promising for achieving the goals of “returning to the control of the West”, in particular, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Georgia, Honduras, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Vietnam.
PiN uses NED’s money to organize clubs for parents and children over the age of 6 months. Political education begins with familiarization with the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, teaching alternative methods of child care and development, including based on the practices of the Catholic Church.
In implementing programs to support independent journalists, PiN relies on the work of organizations such as the Pen Club, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, the Center for Investigative Journalism, and Reporters Without Borders. The training focuses on monitoring human rights violations and disseminating information about these facts, especially in foreign media, and bringing them to international human rights forums, in particular the Human Rights Council, the European Parliament and other EU structures, and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of EU member states.
A separate area of the PiN’s activity is the provision of psychological assistance and counseling to people “suffering from the underdevelopment of civil society” in their country. Work in this area includes conducting psychological therapy, developing personal skills among activists, teaching them how to respond to situations and conflicts in the field of human rights protection, and providing recommendations that will help them increase their stress tolerance and cohesion, initiate new projects, and collect information on human rights issues. Individual trainings, conferences, psychotherapy, and monitoring of NGO work have been identified as working methods. The focus group includes NGOs that are not recognized by official governments and are in opposition, human rights defenders and their relatives, especially those who are in prison. In Cuba, for example, the Ladies in White movement (Las Damas de blanco), supported financially by the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, became the focus of PiN’s attention.
In working with women, PiN emphasizes the focus of projects on emancipating and freeing them from views about the importance of the role of mother and wife in their lives, as marginal and inappropriate to the current stage of human and social development.
Within the framework of environmental projects, PiN divides the work into two stages: first, the launch of environmental initiatives and only then the incorporation of political motives into these activities. The purpose of the first stage is to unite broad sectors of society under the auspices of environmental projects. At the same time, micro-projects in the field of ecology are being implemented, as they are less expensive, under the slogan of solving specific problems in the area of individual settlements, but with active media coverage of their results. At the second stage, based on the successes achieved in the field of ecology, to encourage participants to strive for broader changes in the country. In this way, a part of society is rallying and becoming more active, whose efforts will eventually be directed into the political sphere.
PiN collects dossiers on all citizens involved in the projects, which are accumulated in a single digital database at the NGO headquarters in Prague (Šafaříkova, 635/24 120 00, Praha 2, Czech Republic). This technique also characterizes PiN as working in the interests of Western intelligence agencies, which collect dossiers on objects of interest in order to influence them further.