UN Watch, an NGO that monitors the UN and has ties to Israeli lobby groups, has criticised UNRWA for aiding Palestinian refugees
UNRWA provides a lifeline to five million Palestinian refugees (AFP)
Monday 7 March 2016 22:57 UTC
Last update:
Tuesday 8 March 2016 0:33 UTC
Topics:
Operating as a humanitarian organisation in the Palestinian territories presents challenges even during the best of times. The devastation wrought by the Gaza war in 2014 and the conflict in Syria has put unprecedented pressure on relief efforts. The logistical obstacles of delivering aid to a conflict zone could be seemingly insurmountable.
Now one of the oldest and most established humanitarian groups in the region faces another problem - it is under fire from factions that want to undermine its reputation and stop its funding. None of this is helped by the fact that the group in question is facing a funding crisis of its own.
This is no ordinary organisation and no small sum of money - this is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which has a budget of $1.5bn this year for regular programmes and emergency work and provides a lifeline to five million Palestinian refugees, permanently displaced by the Middle East’s most intractable struggles.
The deepening crisis in the Middle East has put a considerable strain on UNWRA’s finances – its cash deficit this year rose to $85mn.
But a well-connected group with links to vocal figures in Washington has launched an aggressive campaign over the last few months to discredit UNWRA.
“It shows how the humanitarian sector has become so politicised - when it starts to involve UN agencies, you’ve got a problem,” said Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at RUSI in London.
Geneva-based UN Watch says it is an NGO and involved with “monitoring the UN and promoting human rights” and ensuring the fair treatment of United Nations member states. Judging by its activities, however, UN Watch appears more as a lobby organisation with strong links to Israel. It is a subsidiary of the American Jewish Committee, one of the oldest Jewish lobby groups in the US.
Even though much of UN Watch’s work strongly campaigns against human rights abuses in many parts of the world, Israeli human rights abuses remains notably absent from its website.
Whatever its affiliations, UN Watch has a strong network. Reporters pick up their material during daily press briefings by the State Department and the UN Secretary General’s office in New York. The organisation's allies include Elliot Abrams, National Security adviser director under George W Bush, who has long called for UNWRA to be closed down because of its links supposed links to Hamas and terrorism.
UN Watch also has a history of strongly opposing Palestinian-affiliated groups. It lobbied the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) member states to reverse the decision to grant the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), an NGO based in London, special consultative status to the ECOSOC last summer. Its campaign failed and the PRC was admitted.
Now UN Watch has turned its attention to UNWRA, raising questions over funding it receives from governments around the world, particularly the $400mn it gets from the US. The group’s executive director, Hille Neuer, tweets regularly to Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, and John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, about UNWRA. They ignore his tweets.
“There are plenty of people who know how to use the system and that often involves tools such as criticising funding - or calling for a funding cut or bank account closures,” said Keatinge at RUSI.
“These are effective ways of disrupting an organisation’s activities - we use it on terrorists, others use it on groups that they think are close to terrorists,” he added.
Since the US-led "War on Terror," the charitable sector, particularly in the Middle East, has become heavily politicised. Many humanitarian groups, including those accused of funding terrorism indirectly through third parties, have been pursued by US and Israeli authorities, resulting in closures and assets seizures.
UN Watch has seized upon a recent controversy that has seen a number of UNWRA employees disciplined for using Facebook to celebrate attacks against Israelis. Violence surged last autumn in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem when Israeli settler attacks sparked a spate of lone wolf stabbings by Palestinians against Israeli military officers, settlers and civilians.
Anti-Semitic messages were posted on the social-networking site, including cartoons and posts glorifying attacks against Israelis. Some turned out to be from fake accounts and not connected to UNWRA employees but some were genuine. UNWRA took action and suspended employees who were punished with suspension from work and loss of pay. It worked with Facebook to take down over 100 offending accounts. In early March, UN Watch reported that Laila Mokhiber, UNWRA’s US communications director, had posted anti-Israel tweets, violating UN neutrality rules.
A spokesman for UNWRA declined to comment on UN Watch, but said: "UNRWA takes all allegations of violations of UN principles as well as its neutrality and established social media policies very seriously.”
“UNRWA condemns and will not tolerate anti-Semitism or racism in any form. Every allegation brought to our attention has either been or is being assessed, and where there are prima facie facts to support the allegation, we take disciplinary action in accordance with due process,” the spokesman added.
UN Watch declined to comment and failed to respond to Middle East Eye's emailed questions about its activities, political and financial affiliations.
Tensions between UNWRA and Israel have run high since the 2014 Gaza War when UNRWA discovered weapons components in the agency’s schools. UNWRA says it called in bomb disposal experts answerable to the government of national unity, which didn’t have close ties to Hamas, but Israel criticised the move, saying this amounted to giving the stockpiles to the group.
Many Israelis and right-wing Americans view UNWRA with scepticism over its perceived bias to the Palestinian cause. Out of 30,000 UNWRA staff, many of whom are Palestinians working in Gaza, it is inevitable that some staff might hold misgivings towards Israel, said Chris Doyle at The Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU).
“If UNWRA staff have been taken to task about this, it’s certainly not justified at all but it’s not surprising either, said Doyle.
“As an employer, it largely employs Palestinians at its schools and community centres. If you have Palestinian employees in Gaza, and Gaza is being bombed and blockaded, you can’t expect them to remain oblivious to what is going on around them.”
The attacks on UNWRA by UN Watch continue.
Late last year, Neuer attacked UNWRA spokesman Chris Gunness for speaking at an event with the UK charity Interpal at the House of Commons, attended by a number of MPs and members of the House of Lords. Interpal and UNWRA have been official partners for years. The charity is proscribed by the US as a terrorist organisation but has been cleared three times by the UK Charity Commission of having links to terrorism.
When it comes to its own funding, UN Watch doesn’t list donors. An investigation by Spinwatch, the investigative website, found that the Geneva-based group received over $1.8mn between 2003-2007 from the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee (AJC). It’s not known if UN Watch still receives funding from the AJC, which has changed the way it has reported its grant-making in the past few years. Spinwatch also uncovered a network of powerful Jewish advocacy, lobby groups and charities that also fund UN Watch and the AJC. Many of these in turn support a tight-knit network of right-wing, Islamophobic groups in the US and Israel.
Neuer is well-connected to these groups. In October, Lleana Ros-Lehtinen, a member of the US House of Representatives and a powerful Republican politician, introduced a bill to cut off UNWRA funding.
She accused UNWRA of having links to terrorism, saying it propagated a “systemic and endemic anti-Israel, anti-Semitic bias and … blatant incitement to violence”.
What would a funding cut for UNWRA mean? Doyle At CAABU saif it would be devastating.
“It would be a huge deal for Palestinian refugees in terms of delivery of services, primary healthcare and food parcels. It’s massively important. UNWRA is already underfunded as it is,” he said.
“If refugee communities have nowhere to go to and have no aid then they are of course more liable to fall into the arms of extremists.”
No comments:
Post a Comment