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The US Agency for International Development, America's global development agency, has been exposed as conducting secretive democracy-promotion programmes in Cuba.

US meddling disguised as aid

It's one thing to help, through foreign aid, poor countries to get on their own feet. It's something else to promote "democracy" in the guise of such aid.

It's one thing to help, through foreign aid, poor countries to get on their own feet. It's something else to promote "democracy" in the guise of such aid, which could easily be seen by the governments of countries so targeted as an attempt to destabilise or destroy them.

The US Agency for International Development, America's global development agency, has been exposed as conducting secretive democracy-promotion programmes in Cuba. Since the exposé, there has been increasing domestic pressure, including a Senate bill, to bar the agency from conducting further such undercover operations. The USAid Cuba programmes in question involved using a Twitter-like service to bypass the country's internet censorship and to recruit new dissidents without revealing the operators' direct link to the US government.

There is evidence that Cuba is not the only country in which USAid has conducted such undercover operations. If so, such programmes threaten to undermine both the reputation of the agency and the often much needed aid work it has done around the globe over many years. Defending his agency, USAid Administrator Rajiv Shah said the programmes were not covert, only "discreet" to protect the people involved. The distinction is largely semantic.

The Senate bill aims to prohibit the agency from spending money on democracy programmes in countries that reject the agency's assistance. The exposé has been so embarrassing that even the US State Department has been forced to review some of its own secretive democracy-promotion programmes in hostile countries.

Some high-risk USAid programmes may now be taken over by the State Department. Others could shift to the National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit group that receives funding from the US government. The endowment has already been accused by Beijing of funding pro-democracy groups and fomenting unrest in Hong Kong. The latest revelations will raise more questions about its credibility.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: US meddling disguised as aid
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