The role and impact of non-governmental organizations in Transcaucasian countries are very important for us. Here the NGOs started to occur from the beginning of 90's. They are active in different sectors: human rights, legal issues, humanitarian problems, environment protection, women issues, Internally Displaced Persons, healthcare, education and culture. It is considered that there are several thousand NGOs in Armenia and Georgia, a little bit less in Azerbaijan, as there the state was not supportive and used to hinder registration process of NGOs till recently. That is why many Azeri NGOs were functioning de facto lacking legal status.
Governments of all three countries fear that NGOs might become a strong weapon in arms of opposition political parties. It is also the fact that there are some politicized NGOs that as a rule are fulfilling political orders (ones of government or opposition), there are also Soviet type NGOs (professional unions), research NGOs, but luckily the climate in NGO community is created by truly neutral, active, sometimes even aggressive NGOs that are truly protecting democratic values. Only due to the activities of the latter, governmental institutions begin to recognize them as partners. Public opinion is also an important problem for NGOs, because at certain level there is a belief in society that NGOs are undercover agents of Masons (to serve some hostile imperialistic powers), designed to destroy everything that is national, encourage harmful cosmopolitan ideology and receive sponsorship for these purposes from their master donors. According to another popular viewpoint the main purpose of the NGO is to gain grants for the sake of its members. It is important to mention that the above said way of thinking is big deal encouraged by government officials.
We are striving to Europe but the most important thing in this process is that the idea of democratization itself is not devaluated and discredited. Some people are naïve in their belief while others deliberately claim that western values will bring nothing but unemployment, drug addiction, prostitution, poverty, hunger and homelessness for the biggest portion of the population. In the environment of collapsed economy corrupted government cannot or doesn't want to change anything for better and nostalgia to good old communism wins over beautiful words or noble intentions. In cases like these it is vital to have quick results, otherwise the society will fall apart and it will be impossible to collect tiny peaces of existing democratic achievements.
During our joint meeting in Yerevan in March 2000 within the frames of this project from Transcaucasia only Georgia was member of Council of Europe. Our colleagues from Azerbaijan and Armenia were asking us what did this membership do for the country? What are the positive changes that have occurred in reality and not only on the paper? If we take a close look at this problem we would discover that Georgian government treated the requirements of human rights supporters and advocates (domestic as well as international) in a very constructive and sensitive way prior to the admission to the Council than afterwards. Our colleagues from Armenian and Azeri NGOs even mentioned that it is better not to hurry to enter the Council but use potential membership as an effective tool to put pressure over their governments for sake of real democratic changes. This attitude has its own logic.
Of course Georgia is a member of the Council of Europe since 1999 but the membership itself is not the goal as many politicians consider, for human rights NGO community this membership is a tool, some kind of resource for their activities to improve human rights conditions in the country. That is why future activities of NGOs as well as whole civil society need to be focused towards this direction.