Thaindian News

Washington, Apr. 15 (ANI): American officials and others looking back at the uprisings of the Arab Spring, they are seeing that the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known.

The Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections, have trained key leaders of the movements, the New York Times reports.A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a non-profit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.The work of these groups often provoked tensions between the United States and many Middle Eastern leaders, who frequently complained that their leadership was being undermined, according to the cables.

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations.

The National Endowment receives about 100 million annually from Congress.

“We didn’t fund them to start protests, but we did help support their development of skills and networking,” the NYT quoted Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy and research group, as saying.

He added: “That training did play a role in what ultimately happened, but it was their revolution. We didn’t start it.” (ANI)