Berliner Tageblatt - Other governments 'weaponising' Trump language to attack NGOs: rights groups

Civil society groups in parts of Eastern Europe and beyond -- long targeted by discredit-and-defund campaigns because of the light they shone on corruption and lack of transparency -- are now also dealing with Trumpian rhetoric, they said.

Trump administration statements "are being weaponised in real-time by autocrats and dictators across Eastern and Southeastern Europe to justify and deepen their crackdown on independent media, NGOs, and human rights defenders," Dave Elseroad, of the Human Rights House Foundation, told AFP.

From Hungary to Serbia, to Georgia and Bosnia, non-governmental organisations and independent media outlets working to bolster democratic norms are hearing officials borrow White House phrases to justify officials' stances against them.

The range of expressions available is broad and growing.

It includes Trump's claim that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was "run by radical lunatics", and his billionaire advisor Elon Musk's calling the agency a "criminal organisation" that needed to be put "through the woodchipper".

Such terms are "seriously encouraging language used in Budapest or in Belgrade or in Bratislava or Banja Luka," said Miklos Ligeti, head of legal affairs at Transparency International's Hungary chapter.

- Verbal ammunition -

In some countries, the verbal ammunition comes on top of a sudden funding gap wrought by the dismantling of USAID, which is hitting the NGO sector hard.

USAID had been providing funding to a vast array of independent organisations in countries like Hungary where such groups have been "financially suffocated domestically," Ligeti told AFP.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has hailed the crackdown on USAID by his ally Trump as a "cleansing wind". He says he plans to outlaw NGOs that receive US funds.

Orban -- also Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest ally in the European Union -- has vowed to "eliminate the entire shadow army" he says is made up of his political enemies, judges, the media and NGOs.

The UN rights office in Geneva slammed "escalating attempts worldwide to weaken and harm domestic and international human rights systems, including defunding and delegitimising civil society".

It said that "it is all the more worrying to see these trends also emerging in established democracies".

In some countries there is a direct line between utterances in Washington and action to undermine civil society.

In Georgia, for example, the ruling Georgian Dream party last month called for the country to adopt its own version of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) -- which observers warn could be turned against NGOs receiving foreign funding.

And in Serbia, which has been rocked by months of protests over government corruption, authorities referred to statements made by Trump and other top US officials to justify raiding a number of NGOs.

The Serbian government saw the Trump administration's labelling of USAID as a "criminal organisation" as "a fantastic opportunity to basically punish civil society", said Rasa Nedeljkov, programme director at the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA).

CRTA's offices were raided in February by heavily armed police. The operation took 28 hours because prosecutors had CRTA staff manually copy documents related to USAID-funded projects to hand to them, rather than accepting digital versions.

Serbian authorities have explicitly referred to statements by Trump and other US officials to justify raids on a number of NGOs.

Uros Jovanovic, public policy programme manager at another raided NGO in Serbia, Grandjanske, said that "this is just an excuse to crack down on civil society," adding: "They are trying to intimidate people to stay silent."

- 'Intimidation' -

Pavol Szalai, head of the EU-Balkans desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF), said leaders in a string of countries were using "the suspension of USAID by Trump to attack media which had received USAID funds".

He said such groups were being doubly punished: they "lost their funding from one day to the next" while also increasingly being "targeted by intimidation".

In Republika Srpska, Bosnia's ethnic Serb statelet, "this is the worst situation ever for civil society organisations (since) the after-war period," said Bojana Mijic, project manager at Capital.Ba, an independent online daily.

"Independent voices are being lost," with many organisations closing from evaporated USAID funding and swelling attacks, she said.

The RSF's Szalai said: "We fear that this public-interest journalism in some countries will not survive the blow."

He warned that, "as these media retreat.. they will be replaced by propaganda".

K.Thomson--BTB