FRANCAISNorwegian People’s Aid - History
1960-1969
-1963, Former-Yugoslavia: NPA sends relief to the victims of an earthquake in Skopje.
-From 1969, El-Salvador: NPA participates to the construction of social housing in the capital city and rural development projects in the countryside. As the civil war gets worse in the 1980s, the organisation also helps refugees in Belize and Honduras. Within Salvador, it runs health programmes with the Comandos de Salvamento and tries to support peace negotiations between the army and the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberacíon Nacional) guerrilla. Thus, NPA starts in 1990 to back the CPDN (Comité Permanente del Debate Nacional). Launched in 1988 by Ignacio Ellacuría, a rector of the University of San Salvador who was suspected by the military to advise the rebels, this Committee includes a Lutheran Bishop, Medardo Gómez, and a Baptist secretary of the Salvadorian Council of Churches, Edgar Palacios. Hence it receives a lot of funding from protestant networks, i.e. the World Council of Churches (WCC), the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the Swedish Diakonia, the German Brot für die Welt and the Dutch Inter-Church Organisation for Development Co-operation (ICCO). But the Committee looses the support of the Catholic Church because it is accused of being the political front of the FMLN before the opposition can have MPs and officially participate to elections in March 1991. On 14th December 1991, the CPDN organises a big march with 100,000 demonstrators against peace initiatives of the far-right (Unidad y Paz 91 and Cruzada pro Paz y Trabajo), which opposes the reduction of troops. Paradoxically, NPA increases its grants when the CPDN becomes less important, that is when the peace accord of Chapúltepec ends in January 1992 the negotiations started in April 1990. The Committee does not try to develop its own fund raising, relies on foreign contributions, and expects 1,6 million dollars for the 1994 elections. As its budget increased fourfold during the last four years, it can not spend all this money. So it creates a reserve, gives grants to other NGOs and organise demonstrations. According to Kees Biekart, several reasons explain the mistakes of donors: they were too slow to give grants; the CPDN overestimated its needs; there was no evaluation, no co-ordination between aid agencies, and a wrong political analysis on the role of the Committee after the peace accord.
