Interaction w the 3rd World as Tech Cooperation-2

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'Balneology? What’s that? Is there such a word?!’

‘The diesel ignites from a candle – I see a candle icon each time I start my diesel,
the difference from petrol is the nozzle to feed fuel into the cylinder!’


as it will get frozen and explode.’

‘Vienna to Moscow is a long flight, must be six hours.’

‘The IAEA is working towards reducing the half-lives of radioactive isotopes. ’






Part I was theory. Now Part II or
Truth



The higher is the level of an IO (e.g. UN Family cornerstone organizations), the greater is the amount of preparatory checks (consultancies, meetings, missions, etc) held in order to ascertain the rightness of the activity implementation way, which obviously checks the otherwise smooth run of the respective programme.


A separate check to IOs’ cooperation with aided countries, to TC in particular, is local top officials’ mentality existing in those countries, when some of them begin to earnestly consider themselves as belonging to the so-called developed world (since the etiquette of the IOs prescribe the behaviour towards third world nationals as with equals), while, being top-level individuals within their nations, also as the developers of strategy and (which is the most dangerous!) of tactics for equipment supply and for staff selection from among their country citizens for training abroad. Such local top officials treat TC-conducting organizations as warehouses of free goods and items (which operate like ‘supplied as soon as ordered’ – meaning supplying the desired equipment and goods as opposed to the equipment and spare parts required in virtue of the respective TC project) and as free travel agencies (to add to the minuses of the grant-based assistance philosophy). Examples are known when the local representatives of their governments consider and treat themselves in earnest to be the apex of Alexander, Bismarck, Genghis, Hideyoshi, Mao, Stalin, and Suleiman in one person with a subsequent, sometimes yahoo, behaviour, which altogether is a revelation of the feudal nature of the respective, eternally aided nations. One must disroot similar attitude to TC processes from the local shahs – this being an instruction to a TC project manager (and to the manager’s management if the manager’s terms of reference or will are insufficient for her or him to act as needed). In many cases, local TC project-performing teams are composed of friends and subordinates of those top and semi-top officials – a fret to the otherwise smooth run of a project hidden under the ‘willingness in the local Government’ type of risk in a typical framework matrix.


A peculiarity of IOs is that factually they are clubs bordering on coffeehouses or hangouts with no liability against their taken commitments (apart from the very particular cases like the safeguards regime of the IAEA or air carrier safety listings by the ICAO). Reference or technical documentation that a few IOs are mandated with developing is granted the status of recommendations only.


As a result of employing the RBM approach, ‘milking cow’ TC projects established solely to fund ad-hoc supplies and travel continue to exist and expand. Building a ‘milking cow’ is easy – one should just create an activity in a TC project or an entire TC project with something like ‘Addressing urgent needs / Alleviating disaster aftermath’ as its title. TC projects are extensively used to evade taxation (because TC is tax-exempt per definition) as well as to store funds (by way of their dedicated transferral to a TC project account against particular tasks with a following non-execution of those tasks, i.e. through the use of TC project accounts as of ‘piggy banks’).


The policy of involving nationals of all the Member States of an IO on its staff, four fifths of which by definition are from ‘the third world’, drastically reduces opportunities for finding proper candidates. That kind of a blindly performed ‘affirmative action’ does nothing but harm if the subject IO is rather specialized in its nature and requires availability of very special competences. As a result, staff of an IO – in its two thirds – is a congregation of crooks, deadbeats, mendicants and scoundrels lacking education as well as any practical work experience. A World’s predominance in an IO may lead to culturally inadequate people being set at decisive positions as opposed to intellectuals. TC management-level personnel often has no TC background and thus little clue of what TC together with its ‘unwritten laws’ and ‘rites’ is and which TC networks exist alongside why and how they have formed. There are examples when such managers from an IO could not identify another IO or an international programme as one doing TC and – vice versa – mistook a programme to be of TC. Staff to TC units of IOs is gathered from people who are low educated (down to elementary read-and-write skills!) and/or inexperienced with regard to the positions they hold, viewed altogether, they are simpletons, which one sees even after a short communication period. This narrative sets out with examples of the level of education and general knowledge of basic science by some IO and TC staff as with its epigraph, where examples one and three are of third world individuals, while two and four are of those from educated nations. A management person may be hired from the outer world with no clue about the essence of this IO, daring to bounce it back with ‘that means nothing to me’ after a staff expert’s experienced opinion is expressed on the preferability of one option against another. Support staff to entities funding frontline research and innovation initiatives (accounting offices, procurement units) is collected from the local working class, being of the respective cultural bearings and development level and unable to tell a difference between a deep theorist and a machine operator. Contemporarily in IOs and specifically in TC, a project manager and a management person are oftentimes from the Third World. The fifth sentence out of the epigraph is from a top IO management individual of the Third World.


Much depends, despite logic, on a particular staff member, i.e. when the staff in charge of an activity changes, the commitment adopted by the IO may simply be withdrawn, e.g. an already agreed supply of hazardous equipment may be put on hold or even discarded.


The internal language of most international organizations is English, however, its knowledge appears to be far from a language of actual communication, especially among the majority of the staff originating from Roman-speaking countries, from Central and Eastern Europe, and from Asia and the Pacific (with few exceptions), while Africans usually speak a very good English.


A TC-leading IO’s Secretariat may consist ninety per cent of local staff at professional positions (P-grades in the UNO’s language), who thus have no diplomatic immunity. There have been very special examples of TC-leading IOs with local staff whose sci&-tech background enormously exceeded that of foreign staff at professional posts, such abnormalities having become possible because of very low economic conditions in the hosting country (e.g. ISTC, where the host was the financial aid recipient and technology transfer enabler at the same time).


Bullet 1 of Definition 4 in Part I says nothing about the direction of funding, this is why the ISTC was a very unique case, when the funded side was conducting technical assistance to the funder, i.e. Russia did technical assistance of the West (primarily, the USA) with the respective technology transfer occurring as frontline knowledge sharing, including test results, and supplies of pilot batches of newest equipment.


Bullet 4 afterwards envisages a way to acquire necessary equipment along with skills to hold sway for a well-off country by agreeing with an IO to raise a fund against a monstrous woe, an account that the country with its monies feeds, solely aimed at meeting that specific country’s needs.
University-gained education neither includes nor overlaps high-school-gained education in one of the two Worlds, so that candidates for positions at IOs should indicate the high school(s) where they were primarily trained, as one of the two Worlds has been more influential within the staff of all IOs since the mid-1990s.


As has been reminded, intercontinental and inter-state – in fact, inter-World – immigration occurred in considerable quantities in the end of the 20-th and in the beginning of the 21-st century, which – entailing political reorientation under a preserved human culture – has led to the respective professional attitude held among those immigrants: the newly acquired home was now kept true for all it states and does, while the other World was wrong by definition. Many such individuals work both on the staff and as external experts of the IOs. A peculiarity of those people is in saying ‘(it) is very important’ when they have no ready proof to support the assertion they just made, which happens quite often.


The IOs feature nowadays (beginning from 2015) maintaining gender equality (which means equal staffing with men and women) and tolerance (a must-be presence of adepts of the same-gender relations and of people who are uncertain about their gender) for its own sake, even against the needs and requirements of the work, i.e. against common sense. Another plague of the IOs is favouritism – staff is found and hired from among friends, relatives and other prot;g;s, regardless of their professional relevance, and tolerated, because they will do little harm to the employer, it generating no profit. The person’s geopolitical background may have an implication towards her or his preferability as well if the respective IO is somehow biased towards a camp among its instituting Member States. A consequence of such grouping may also be the forced installation of equipment or software produced in a country of the group, especially if the equipment or software is on low sales at the marketplace, while the producer needs to sell it anyway. The management of the IO then screens the installation of the respective equipment or software under all possible pretexts – from its exceptional technical performance to the corporate culture of the Family or a network of similar organizations the IO administratively or logically belongs to. All this is mentioned apart from the well-known fact that country camps or groups within an IO can give rise to the IO’s declarations or recommendations to its Member States or to the Globe favouring the policies and practices of one camp or group and chastising those of another. Partially because of the grouping, IOs sometimes demonstrate the attitude typical of political parties or commercial companies, namely IOs try to get involved or at least show their presence in areas or single occurrences far from the IOs’ original mandates with relevance to the mandate restored by amending it accordingly.


Some thereby grouped countries, for instance, tend to re-build a particular UNO Family institution – the IAEA – into a second – or, better say, another – UNO, as the former keeps on following the policy of (trying to be) helping out on occasions barely pertinent or completely unrelated to atomic energy. Use is being made here directly from the availability of a huge specialized TC department therein, while apposite UN Family entities happen to have none on their organigrams.


PA and other TC project documents (a Member State’s signature under its TC participation charter, to begin with) include legal support by the respective IO in case of any IP violation from a commercial Partner, of a violation by a Member State’s obligation of its citizen’s mandatory employment according to the acquired profile after a training provided by the IO, which the IOs follow in amounts of cases ranging from seldom to never.


Although TC IOs may fund PCT patent applications, the truth is that the respective Partner provides for its funding of a project under the conditions that it owns a non-exclusive license for the generated IP (though the IP had been generated years ago) or simply withdraws from the respective project as soon as filing fresh IP is looming and uses its marketplace strengths to have all the rights reserved.


One of the two Worlds may fund an application of a technology developed in a country of the other World at a Third World area – e.g. designing and building an environmental protection barrier – and then claim that it had completely provided  the aid, aiming at a political gain.


People utilize TC opportunities to make personal profit, since it may seldom entail a punishment, while remuneration can be high. The simplest way is to provide for a consultancy on a topic that no one needs implemented but friends in an IO may justify its usefulness and thus advisability for the IO to avail it. The development of ToRs is a sub-category of such consultancies, costing from a few thousands up to a few dozens of thousands USD per sample, depending on the range of the activities to be covered in the ToR.
Country and governmental representatives are very often people of a factory worker’s or a plumber’s educational background and behavioural type. Management officials heading international cooperation units or divisions of technically relevant institutions in the countries may come from a wide circle of distant backgrounds – from theologians to military interpretation officers, not to mention the example of a country that appointed a tank commander to the position of its minister of foreign affairs. Countries would designate those officials to speak for the institutions at technical events.
According to the already mentioned, diplomats are a part of the TC circle of operation. Monitors (or controllers as they think of themselves, instructed by their management in capitals) of the staff originating from the countries that the diplomats represent, trained smilers at meetings where they are the least relevant people, do-nothings when diplomatic interference and help are in sudden need, they are quite a specific public in these and a few other respects. At meetings, a diplomat may follow the capital’s instructions precisely to the extent of replying ‘I have no comment’ even after the diplomat is addressed with a question about her/his country’s position towards the subject of the meeting. If a diplomat dares to raise a voice on a technical question, it either evokes laughter (maybe, hidden one) or, vice versa, serious and rather detailed responses, like when experts treat a dupe.


In a regional TC project, its focal country cannot be denoted a ‘coordinator’, as it has no practical leverage to monitor and to drive another project participant country to implement as planned, if need be, despite the formally agreed participation of any such country in the project, but only is able in fact to request other participant countries to submit their reports after a checking point in time (a ‘milestone’) is passed or an event has occurred.


It is not that rare when a need arises to reduce the accentuation of a regional TC project to be to the use for a select group of countries (which, as has been shown, often hampers its use for another). Therefore it is sufficient, obviously, to broaden the objectives and multiply the applications of the project, ‘spreading’ its theme over a number of interrelated tasks, which number should be as great as possible, and over the gamut of project participant teams. Furthermore, under a similar approach, a task foreseeable from the onset as counter-profitable – in the sense of the utmost reason for TC, which is an accepting nation’s experience accrual and a donating nation’s technology transfer – can be annihilated on the go due to the presence in the project of tasks of greater priority at the time as well as to the overall amount of tasks.


A success story in respect of using this approach is the development, back in 2016, of an IAEA TC regional project proposed by Ukraine on laying the computational and statistical background behind the utilization of Westinghouse-produced nuclear fuel in their VVER-1000 reactors (essentially, a national TC project). The proposed fuel source diversification was broadened onto the utilization of TVEL-produced nuclear fuel in reactors built by non-TVEL-oriented producers (Westinghouse, in particular) and in the other subject countries of the region (Europe) as well as onto uranium in its different forms (alloys, dioxide, hexafluoride, etc), at the different stages during the production of fuel assemblies, and of its various isotopic compositions. Kazakhstan was chosen to be the focal country, it being the custodian state in charge of the IAEA low-enriched uranium repository (the IAEA LEU Bank) and a state equally neutral with regard to the project-originating country as well as to the beneficiary country of the TVEL Company. The modified project is evidently much closer both to the mandate of the project-owning IO (IAEA) and to the essence and objectives of a regional TC project.


Despite the reality of the Third World – as opposed to the presumably artificial nature of the wording – devising terms still takes place among politicians in the so-called West, a recent example may have been ‘BRICS’ (Brazil-Russia-India-China-(and then) South Africa). A study political scientist fancied that the five (originally four) nations are of more or less the same cultural and technological development level, it thus making sense to combine them in one cluster for business and political dealings. Surprisingly enough, the four (five afterwards) countries did establish a union of them under that very title.
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CONCLUSIONS
• Many – both in and outside the TC domain – confound technical cooperation with whatever else.
• TC and technical assistance are used for various purposes way beyond assistance and cooperation.
• Education and professional experience play a role in an individual’s suitability for an IO.
• IOs are utilized to help sell ill software and lame or used equipment.
• There are nations assigning countries outside the Third World to the Third World.
• Third World nationals are project managers and management staff in IOs and TC quite often nowadays.
• Third World officials take TC and technical assistance to be aiding mechanisms for their own sake.
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OBSERVATIONS


A few TC and technical assistance programmes are utilized – as part of bullet two – to have frontline technology ooze from the technology owner to the funder, who is ostentatiously not in need of any technological help, or for inside knowledge gathering purposes, the former and the latter being the key reasons for Russia to withdraw from the ISTC and oust its HQ and thus to factually stop the programme.


The latter message may be illustrated with, for instance, the following two examples. The author’s first TC-related experience was rendering English a safety assessment report regarding a nuclear power station in Russia for the US DOE; the demand and follow-on transmission of the report was disguised as the basis for a further consideration of the size and target of the financial aid from the US DOE towards the Russian nuclear power complex with the recipient side’s governmental approvals granted because of no other way out in economically pressing circumstances. The other example is a TC project funded by a country (of one World) to monitor the atmospheric conditions over an area in another country (of another World), adjacent to a restricted access site in a third country (of the Third World) to monitor in fact the ongoing activities in that closed area.


Concurrently, the World appears to appear to be tri-polar, whereas it factually is still the first and second worlds – regardless of the ordering – and the Third World, the third one seemingly being attempted at being headed by a particular nation with the present-tense statement starting the initial paragraph of this chapter – concerning technology misappropriation (besides the expansion of control) – therefore holding true.


A Member State or a group of them may insist that an IO hires a person to its TC unit, out of the TC realm (which is clear from the language the person speaks and the remarks and statements the person makes on TC-relevant matters) but pretending to have worked in a organization-related laboratory: the person will be writing notes in a style resembling that of a scientific journal and with no relation to the TC, then that presumed simpleton will circle oneself with staff members from the ‘other’ World – pretending again to be ‘one of them’ – for use by the person’s puppy managers for access to the closed circle of that World.


If a Third World national serving an assistant parts with her/his manager, she/he may say to the now former manager: ‘You have my phone number, give me a call.’ A subordinate gives thus permission to the boss, while showing the actual ranking in her/his eyes.


A Member State may send a participant to a TC event in an attractive location, who discloses, when at the event, that she/he already parted from the organization represented at the event and, furthermore, that she/he changed her/his occupation entirely, so that this is just a recreation tour free of charge for her or him.


A ‘shah’ in a Third World country formerly in one of the two Worlds may have been set to control the local industry and awarded a scientific degree to lift his importance among the local and in his own eyes, then – if the country went loose from the world controlling it – the shah raises a committee to allot similar awards, e.g. scientific degrees, among friends and relatives. In particular, the shah’s son trained as an interpreter with no understanding of equations may be awarded a PhD in a technical discipline and then further the shah attempts to have the son being awarded the next-in-turn scientific degree – Doctor Scientiae – without the required availability of reams of subject publications nor of fieldwork done personally by the aspirant himself.