FRANCAISNorwegian Church Aid - Comments
5) Links to politics
-Since there is no separation between the Church and the State in Norway, NCA is in very good terms with the various governments in Oslo, whatever the party in power. In the same vein, it always had strong links with the Foreign Office, especially through Trond Bakkevig, the CEIR’s secretary-general from 1984 until 1993 (following Carl Traaen in 1978 and Gunnar Stålsett in 1977) and the political secretary to Labour’s Ministers of External Affairs Knut Frydenlund and Thorvald Stoltenberg in 1987-1988. As a matter of fact, NCA has connections with almost all political parties. CEIR members, for instance, included a Socialist MP and chairman, Berge Furre, a Conservative MP, Bishop Per Lønning, and the chairman of the Centre Party, Gunnar Stålsett. Interestingly enough, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa strengthened ecumenical relations and created new alliances with the political Left and the Labour movement, i.e. groups that traditionally had a distant relationship to the Church. NCA is now close to the non-confessional trade union confederation LO (Lands Organisasjonen), with whom it launched an Initiative for Ethical Trade in 1999.
-All in all, the organisation does not seem to have favoured victims according to their political opinion. On one side, it gave American aid to an Eritrean guerrilla struggling against a Marxist regime in Ethiopia and it helped Afghan refugees (including their commandants) fighting against the Red Army. It also assisted people who ran away from communist repression in Hungary in 1956 or China in 1959. During the Biafra War in 1969, again, it disagreed with the WCC regarding humanitarian aid to rebels whose secession was condemned by leftist groups in Europe. On the other side, NCA opposed the American policy in El-Salvador or Nicaragua in the 1980s. NCA also took some political positions against Washington. Hence Trond Bakkevig argues that it was right for the Norwegian Church to condemn the South African regime because the apartheid system had been given a Christian foundation and so had to be challenged for theological reasons. As soon as 1970, the CEIR participated to the WCC special fund to combat racism and finance liberation movements that were also supported by the USSR. At a conference on Southern African countries in Granavollen in February 1988, it even decided to assist socialist Mozambique in her military build-up against rebels supplied by the apartheid regime.
