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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 November 1999 Issue No. 454 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 November 1999 Issue No. 454
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The ongoing demise of UNRWA
By Graham UsherFollowing the signing of Oslo's Cairo Agreement in May 1994, US State Department officials urged the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to "address the question of its own demise". The need for self-dissolution was based on two premises then prominent in American foreign policy. The first was that a fully-fledged peace treaty between Israel and the PLO would be in place by the close of Oslo's interim period in May 1999. The second was that the "final solution" for the 3.5 million refugees officially under UNRWA's care would be resettlement in their host or other third countries together with the "return" of a limited number to the emerging Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza.
In response to such prompts, UNRWA drew up a new five-year plan whose tacit assumption was that the agency's services would in the not-too-distant future be transferred to "other entities", including the then newly-established Palestinian Authority. Some $368 million was also disbursed over the next five years for Peace Implementation Projects (PIPs) such as new schools and infrastructure for the refugees to sweeten the bitter bill of what (the American and European donors hoped) would be the practical death of the "refugee problem".
Five years on, the final status negotiations on refugees have yet to start, the PIPs have dried up for want of funds, and the PA can barely meet the recurring costs of its own administration, let alone assume responsibility for the 22,000 Palestinians employed by UNRWA. Indeed, of all the predictions born in those halcyon days of 1994 only one has proved accurate -- the progressive "demise" of UNRWA, both as a symbol of the international legitimacy of the refugees' case and as the main service provider for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
At least these are the conclusions of a recent study by the American researcher, Benjamin Schiff. Schiff should know. In 1995, he published Refugees Unto the Fourth Generation, an authoritative and acclaimed history of the agency since its inception in 1950. Schiff posits two main causes behind UNRWA's ongoing decline.
The first is financial. Although the euphoria surrounding Oslo generated extra donations for "special" projects like the PIPs, it did nothing to dent the structural deficit of UNRWA's general budget, out of which are paid the agency's main expenditures on refugees' education, health and social services. In 1998, the UN General Assembly agreed that to maintain existing services and accommodate an annual growth of five per cent in the refugee population UNRWA would need a general budget of $345 million. The agency actually received about $250 million, "a similar shortfall to the previous five years," according to one UNRWA official. The results of these cumulative cuts has been to plunge the agency into a permanent financial crisis, forcing it to adopt ever more draconian "austerity measures" on the refugees whose "welfare" it is mandated to "maintain".
Since 1996, most UNRWA schools have had to work double shifts with a teacher-student ratio "now exceeding 50 per class", says Schiff. There has also been a permanent "freeze" on the hiring of all full-time qualified teachers with "temporary" teachers taken on instead at half the salary. The agency's health services are marked by "ever-increasing patient visits per doctor per day, a reduction in maternal health services, new hospitalisation co-payments [by the refugees], tightened limits on medicine distributions, reductions in clinic services and cleanliness". As for innovatory projects like the women's programme centres that the agency once prided itself on providing, these "have been turned over to local committees and told to become self-supporting". For Schiff, a cursory glance at UNRWA's annual expenditure per refugee over a ten-year period speaks for itself. In 1987 each Palestinian refugee had an annual average of $82 spent on him or her by the agency. By 1997, the amount had declined to $71. It is declining still.
While pointing to the financial shortages as a principle cause of UNRWA's crisis in operations, Schiff is no less scathing about a "top management" team that has not only allowed the disintegration to occur but has in many ways aggravated its dimensions. Citing a 1995 report by the UN's Office of International Oversight Services (OIOS), Schiff describes the agency's "personnel management style" as "personalised, unprofessional, erratic, authority oriented, uncooperative, uninformative" and run "by decree".
Following the report's release, the UNRWA's then commissioner-general, Ilter Turkman, not surprisingly departed the scene. He was replaced by Peter Hansen, who promised a new broom of "transparency", "reform" and an improvement in the "agency's ability to operate in a changing environment". Four years on, Schiff notes that the "top reaches of Turkman's administration [minus Turkman]" are "back at the agency's helm" and that the OIOS report "still well describes the agency's pathologies". He further concludes that UNRWA's top management needs to be "overhauled" for it is "unable to focus on the challenges of the future implied by the Israeli-Palestinian peace process".
Very many UNRWA employees, Palestinian and "international", would agree with Schiff's diagnosis of their organisation's ills. But few are other than pessimistic that much can be done given the ongoing cash crisis and the lack of faith that exists between "top management" on the one hand and the donors and "host" governments, including the PA, on the other. For one UNRWA official (who refused to be attributed) there is only one light on an ever darkening horizon. For many years the debate among Palestinian refugees was whether the existence of UNRWA reinforced Palestinians' refugee (and thus national) identity or was part of an "international conspiracy" designed to liquidate their cause. No longer, he says. The rapid demise of UNRWA over the last five years has demonstrated to all and sundry that the surest way to "defend the refugees' right to return is to defend both the symbolic meaning and services provided by UNRWA".
