Fatmira
Not too long ago I asked Fatmira if I was allowed tell her story. She told me I could, provided I present it anonymously. Fatmira is not her real name, the organisations mentioned do not exist. The tale, however, is real.
After the international military intervention, Fatmira worked for DST for several years. As the engaged person she is, she rapidly climbed the internal organizational ladder to become manager of the department for peace initiatives. But, after some good years the inevitable happened: DST left the country and the local staff was destined look for another job.
They decided to continue the initiatives under Fatmira’s guidance and her own local organisation was born. She wrote a project proposal for rebuilding houses for IDPs in an ethnically mixed region and managed to find a good source for project money. I still remember my positive surprise that a local organisation emerged tackling this type of work.
It lasted about a year. It started to go wrong when a representative of a large international organization insisted the project should be supervised by someone from an international NGO with more experience, suggesting PSD for the job. And in due time things changed quickly: the PSD representative became the manager of the project, Fatmira continued to do most of the work.
The project went well. After a whirlwind of appointments, negotiations and lots of fussing around, the reconstruction was ready to go. All in close cooperation with the IDPs and the receiving community.
It did not happen. Just before the construction would start, it turned out the international manager ‘had transferred the project funds to a foreign bank account’. Furthermore, he couldn’t really explain why he had done so, as he himself had disappeared as well. As a result, construction was halted. And after a while, the project was cancelled. Fatmira was forced to offer her apologies personally and publicly to the disappointed occupants and returnees. Nothing was built. The manager was caught. The local organisation was dissolved. Everyone lost.
I am not saying that these kind of events happen a lot or that criminal activities like these have a structural relationship with development cooperation (although these things do occur regularly in the absence of a strict legal framework in a post-war situation). What I actually wanted to stress is that in the scene of the international GO and NGO professionals, it is frequently accepted too easily that a local NGO would need to be supervised in some way or another. This easy and unquestioned acceptance that local NGO people would be less professional than the international ‘experts’, was certainly not necessary in this case: it was a disaster.
Currently, Fatmira is not active for a local NGO, though she still aspires to work in peacebuilding. From time to time she takes up the odd freelancing job, provided she can find herself in the mission. Her passion for this line of work did not go away.
