International Development Committee
Oral evidence: The UK’s Development Work in the Middle East, HC 948
Tuesday 25 February 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 February 2014
Written evidence from witnesses:
– United Nations World Food Programme
Members present: Sir Malcolm Bruce (Chair); Hugh Bayley; Sir Tony Cunningham; Fabian Hamilton; Pauline Latham; Sir Peter Luff; Mr Michael McCann; Chris White
Questions 1-61
Witnesses: Amir Abdulla, Deputy Executive Director, UN World Food Programme, Nigel Pont, Regional Director for the Syrian Response, Mercy Corps, Jehangir Malik, UK Director, Islamic Relief, gave evidence.
Chair: Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming in to help us with our inquiry. This is the first formal evidence session we are having on our inquiry into the Middle East in general and particularly Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine occupied territories in Israel—it is a fairly big picture. I just wonder if you could introduce yourselves for the record.
Nigel Pont: I am Nigel Pont. I am Regional Director for Mercy Corps for the entire Middle East. I am based in Beirut, but I primarily focus on running Mercy Corps’ Syria Response.
Amir Abdulla: I am Amir Abudulla. I am the World Food Programme’s Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, based at our headquarters in Rome.
Jehangir Malik: I am Jehangir Malik. I am the UK Director at Islamic Relief. I am based in London.
Q1 Chair: Thank you very much, and welcome. To start the scene‑setting, what do you see as the situation in Syria, which seems to be deadlocked, and, if anything, getting worse? Do you think any resolution is possible anytime soon? What are you specifically doing, directly or through partners? Clearly, with all the access, some things you can do directly and some things you have to do through partners on the ground.
Nigel Pont: The humanitarian situation inside Syria is particularly dire, right now. We have seen a continued erosion of coping mechanisms and support structures. The economic situation in the country continues to deteriorate, and with it the humanitarian conditions. There are probably three or four different categories of people in need within Syria. The first is those in besieged areas, of whom there are about quarter of a million, of which the recent efforts to provide assistance in Homs is a case in point: 3,000 people are trapped inside Homs, out of a quarter of a million in besieged areas, out of a total of 3 million who are hard to reach.
The humanitarian situation within Syria is dire. The insecurity is terrible. The ability to provide humanitarian assistance from wherever to whoever needs it most is particularly challenged. The situation in the bordering countries and the refugee countries is also of some concern. The challenges are different in those locations because, to a large extent, we do have access in the refugee settings. However, there is a huge caseload, and the needs also outpace the resources that are available for it. Before my colleagues chime in, what we are particularly concerned about in the refugee setting is the tensions and the pressures placed on those bordering countries, on the host nations, and in host communities in particular. As we go forward, we are going to need to pay particular attention to those issues.
Q2 Chair: I think we understand that. We have had a briefing from the World Food Programme, which is doing fantastic work under very difficult circumstances.
Amir Abdulla: I fully agree with every point that Nigel has made. You talk about an end in sight, but quite honestly it is difficult to see what will happen next. This is not just a war between two parties. The splintering of the opposition and the added elements from all around the region, on both sides, make it very, very complex and very complicated. From a Middle East perspective, we are probably looking at a situation that is potentially one of the most grave and one of the ones that has the highest degree of likelihood of causing the region to implode.
We are not beyond the realms of seeing almost a balkanisation of not just Syria, but other countries. If you look at what happened in Iraq after the fall of the regime and everything that has gone on in between, whilst it was really terrible in Iraq and continues to be very difficult there, it was almost contained within Iraq; it was exported marginally. But an implosion or explosion of Syria could potentially impact Jordan, Lebanon, for sure, and will further complicate an already complicated Iraq. Who knows what it will mean even for parts of Turkey? We must not underestimate the potential political dimension of this. Our role, of course, is in providing humanitarian relief to those who are impacted by the situation, whilst recognising that a political solution will be needed; we just carry on doing the work that we can. The United Kingdom has been one of the most generous donors. DFID’s contributions throughout 2013 to the World Food Programme have made the difference between us being able to reach countless people or not.
I would also agree with Nigel that it is not just the political implications for the neighbouring countries but also the economic impact on communities that are already very impoverished communities. The arrival of the refugees and the assistance to the refugees at a time that people in those same countries need some form of assistance is something that we will need to look at as potentially part of the longer-term or medium-term solution. We all know the longer-term solution is eventually a peaceful Syria and a return, but we will need to better integrate what we are doing for host communities at this point, to see what we can do in that area to stop the friction that Nigel has just mentioned.
Q3 Chair: You have talked about where you can reach, but you have places under sustained siege and parts of the country that are not accessible. Does that mean we have got people literally facing hunger and possible starvation, particularly children? We know what the casualties are, but do you have any evidence or information that people are dying of hunger and malnutrition?
Amir Abdulla: Because of access issues to besieged areas, we do not have absolute empirical evidence, but we certainly have anecdotal evidence. Many of the areas have had supply lines cut off. There are many areas we have been unable to access with our assistance. For some of them this has been for three months, six months, nine months, or, for one or two places, a year. We can only imagine how difficult it is.
What we saw post the exodus from Homs indicates that people are in a very, very poor condition. Yesterday, UNRWA were able to get into Yarmouk camp after a very, very long time. We will start to hear from them exactly what they were able to find on the ground. I would say the empirical evidence is not as easy because of the access, but we certainly have anecdotal evidence.
Jehangir Malik: Those are absolutely our sentiments. My colleagues here from the excellent organisations that are operating on the ground, and all the other agencies from the United Kingdom that are operating under very difficult circumstances, recognise the complexities in which we are operating. It is not contained, not regionalised; it has very much spilled over. Each area that is impacted has almost a different set of patterns that require a different type of intervention, even within Syria: northern Syria is very different from southern Syria.
I entered into Syria from Turkey, in a cross-border operation. About 45% of our aid operations are inside Syria, through what we know as cross-border operations. They are very sporadic, not organised in the way that we normally do humanitarian efforts, but it is all to do with the limited amount of access. Many of our fellow aid organisations at the DEC and beyond are operating in this way. It is not ideal. It is not the way that we would like to go about our business, but after three years of besieged areas, we have to call upon desperate measures. I have witnessed absolutely appalling conditions inside Syria. Jordan and Lebanon are areas that have got international access, international systems and refugee camps—Zaatari has been all over the news and so forth—but the lack of access inside Syria has caused extreme strain on those few organisations that are taking life-threatening risks.
Q4 Chair: Are you operating as Islamic Relief inside, or are you operating through local organisations?
Jehangir Malik: We are operating as Islamic relief inside Syria, with the assistance of local medical teams. I visited some of the hospitals and medical centres on the borders, from Reyhanli into the areas. Again, they are very sporadic and not organised. You may be able to reach one area at one time and not another area. It is not the way that we normally go about our business. We cannot provide any continuity; there is no sense of contingency planning; there are not the normal mechanisms that we would apply for this kind of intervention.
Specifically, as evidenced in Lyse Doucet’s BBC piece last night, 50% are children. We are extremely concerned about what is called the “lost generation”. We are really trying to focus on those innocents who are extremely traumatised by the loss and by what they have witnessed. What we are trying to focus upon is that lost generation: how to access them and try to provide some kind of normality in an absolutely dire situation.
Q5 Mr McCann: Good morning, gentlemen. You have touched upon the question I was about to ask. Is humanitarian aid getting through to places like Homs? What practical steps are you having to take? If you are getting aid through, how is that actually being taken forward? Aside from Homs, where is the situation most dire now? You touched upon it; if you can expand upon the answer you gave earlier, that would be helpful.
Nigel Pont: We were not involved in Homs.
Amir Abdulla: What happened in Homs was that there was an agreement for some supplies to be taken in. As those supplies were delivered, agreements were reached on the ground that people could come out. That is why the scenes that one saw were a bit chaotic; that had not necessarily been planned for in that regard. Homs, in a sense, became a little bit of a flashpoint—it highlighted what was going on in so many other places. I think Aleppo has to remain a place of major concern. There are also besieged areas in rural Damascus, as you go through the province into what they refer to as the Reef; you will have pockets of besieged areas even there.
This is one of the difficult factors for people to explain and even for operators on the ground to come to grips with. We often refer to operations as being cross-line, and that lends itself to a mental picture of there somehow being a front line somewhere, as if you are in an area controlled by one and then you go into another. The truth is it is pockets of control, pockets where there is no control and pockets of besieged areas, and these are all over the country. We are almost at the third year since these events began, with a step increase in 2012 and a further increase in 2013, in terms of the level of conflict. During those three years, there has been so much displacement that our best guess at the moment is to see an area that was besieged, work from records of what population numbers used to be in those areas and make estimates. From those estimates, there could be anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million people in those areas that have not been reached for some time. I have to stress that they are estimates.
What we have seen is that in recent times, the World Food Programme, through our various partners, is reaching nearly 4 million people inside Syria on a monthly basis. Our target is to get about 4.2 million or 4.3 million; we have not managed to reach that. Often, the ones we are not reaching are unfortunately in some of those besieged areas. We are reaching many places where we have to go into areas that are non-regime control.
I would say that we basically operate in four areas. The first is clear regime control, where access is possibly easier, for somebody from the Damascus side. Then, there are areas that are clearly under control of a party with whom we can negotiate and get permission to go; those we are reaching. Then, there are areas where the control is not clear, and we try to operate in those areas. There are, unfortunately, areas that are controlled by groups such as al-Nusra, ISIS, ISIL and others, who very clearly have said they do not want anything like the United Nations or international humanitarian relief. We are reaching a significant number of people inside Syria and continue to do so, thanks largely to very generous contributions. Having said that, it is difficult to see how the levels that are needed to sustain an operation like that will be carried on through the whole of 2014.
Q6 Mr McCann: What is the situation in opposition, Jihadist-held towns? Do they refuse offers of aid?
Amir Abdulla: I am not sure. I will ask Nigel whether they managed to work in any of their areas, or Jehangir might know. For us, the United Nations, they have said they do not want us in there. In some instances where they have actually seized certain commodities, they have distributed them or at least told us they have distributed them, but that seizure has been minimal. Given that we are operating in what is basically a war zone, our degree of losses is actually quite low. We have implemented measures to only operate in zones where we have a reasonable degree of expectation that we will get to where we need to be. We run quite a centralised storage system, where we put everything into food packages and only deliver on the days of distribution. That is how we have managed to control large‑scale losses. It would be difficult for me to say what the situation is in those areas, as we have no access.
Nigel Pont: It is important to note that the permission of different parties to the conflict is obviously one piece of it; the other thing is that there is a very active conflict going on in these areas, and there is extreme insecurity. All of our organisations are challenged by what is a threshold of acceptable risk to take, for what types of activities. When we talk about access, we usually think about access to deliver: the ability for a convoy to go from A to B, and a distribution network to make sure that vulnerable people receive the assistance. Equally important, in our opinion, is the ability to conduct assessments, to know what is needed and where, in particular, and to monitor—to make sure that the right people got the assistance.
From an access perspective, it is important to not lose sight of the ability to assess and monitor—standard good practice in humanitarian operations—but we are particularly challenged in conditions of such extreme insecurity. That is where this issue of the threshold of acceptable risk comes in. How much risk are you prepared to take to send a truck with a driver down the road? What is your duty of care with regards to that driver and then, also, a team member or a contractor who has got to go and assess whether the supplies got where they were supposed to go? That is a constant challenge that we are grappling with. Our colleagues at DFID in particular have been really supportive in helping us manage that flexibly and come up with good ways of dealing with that.
Q7 Hugh Bayley: It is clear from what you have just been telling us that the UN Security Council presidential statement last October did not provide the access which it sought to do. Do you believe that the new UN Security Council resolution will make a difference on the ground? If so, how will that access be enforced by the UN?
Amir Abdulla: I guess as the UN I should start. In terms of whether it will make a difference, I think there is, to be very clear, a huge legal and binding difference between a presidential statement and a Security Council resolution. We have to take the fact that a resolution has been passed as a significant step forward. A resolution is binding.
I will come to your last question first. What would happen if the conditions that it stipulates are not met will only be determined by member states themselves going through the Security Council again. Basically, the Secretary General has been asked to report in 30 days and every 30 days thereafter; the Security Council will keep itself engaged. Unless there is a significant improvement, there would be a need to meet again to decide what the consequences would be. The resolution itself does not spell out any Chapter VII or any other intervention or sanctions. At this point, I would not be able to say what would happen.
What I would hope is that it would not get to that and that we will be able to see some form of improvement. That is the way we will be approaching this. We certainly intend to move forward. For example, the Syrian Permanent Representative, after the passing of the resolution, referred to the fact that the Syrians had allowed an air bridge across from Iraq into Syria. We had been trying to do that over land, through a border point there. We could not convert the air operation to a land operation, because that is a border crossing that should be easier to approach. What will be important here is that we do not end up having everything that resolution asks for being seen as just about whether or not cross-border takes place or not. Certainly, cross-border operations will be important at some point, but access to the besieged areas is the most important element. Should that access be provided through routes that come within Syria? As long as access is there and we are able to reach all those communities, that is paramount for us. We do know that some routes will be easier to access cross-border. We are making plans to test that; of course, we will then report back on it.
One of the concerns we do have, though, is that the resolution itself does recognise the territorial integrity of Syria. It is in the preamble and opening. If Syria chooses to take that to mean, “Any border that we do not control contravenes our territorial integrity,” we may still be in a difficult situation. As if it is not complicated enough, there is a further complication. Several of the border crossings that one would need to use are now controlled by al-Nusra and ISIS, who do not recognise the United Nations or the Security Council resolution. Even with approval by Syria, approval by certain parts of the opposition and approval by the neighbouring countries—who will also have to allow the borders to come open—it is going to very complicated. It will not just be down to getting the regime alone; the regime will play a huge role in whether or not we are able to do it, but it will not be the only factor.
Q8 Hugh Bayley: Just to be clear, those Islamists who are saying no to the World Food Programme at the moment and are not giving you access, they are bound by international law in the same way as other people. If apprehended, they presumably could face justice for failing to let food go through.
Amir Abdulla: We are all bound by humanitarian law.
Q9 Pauline Latham: Could you tell us what would need to be done to negotiate with armed opposition groups, including Jihadists, to facilitate the humanitarian access? Do you think it is realistically possible?
Jehangir Malik: Clearly, there are some groups that are not interested in any type of negotiations and that we have not even attempted to go near for a variety of different reasons. We have taken our experiences from various other conflict zones, in Somalia and so forth, and tried to take the same principled approach that ensures our humanitarian integrity, so that nothing is compromised and we do not end up siding with one side or another. As Amir said, there are so-called “no-go” areas for us all, with the intensity of fighting; there are other areas, which are besieged, that we can potentially have greater access to, where the fighting is at a level that is safer. It is about the acceptable risk that was referred to and about allowing our staff to enter into the regions.
It is not just the negotiations, but what risk the organisation is willing to take to be able to go in and ensure that it is not violating any humanitarian principle or international humanitarian law in supplying and providing the necessary, desperately needed humanitarian assistance in the besieged areas. There is not a consistent pattern across Syria—the besieged areas and the fighting. It is all negotiated on a case-by-case and area-by-area basis—almost on a day-to-day, humanitarian convoy-to-convoy basis, internally. What may be a success one day may not be a success another day. Changing plans is the only fixed situation here. Everything is constantly fluid. As long as we can operate and not violate our humanitarian principles—in other words, we do not give out humanitarian aid and assistance to those parties that are controlling or in direct conflict—we operate, but where that is not possible, we are not operational and therefore we have to pull back. We try to operate in the safer zones, as it were, and that has become very, very challenging.
Currently, at the end of 2013, we reached over 1 million people inside Syria but it would not be the same 1 million we would be expecting to reach in 2014, because they would not be in the same places to 2013. They would have moved over into all sorts. There is still a huge amount of crossing over into the different regions, and Jordan and Lebanon. If I can just touch upon Jordan and Lebanon, I was speaking to the Jordanian Ambassador last week or the week before. Jordan and Lebanon have been exceptional in their response to the Syrian crisis. The strain upon the locals is causing tension; that is the spill-over that was referred to earlier. Maybe Nigel will be able to highlight and shed greater light on to this. That aspect of strain on the local populations has a catastrophic potential effect.
With regards to the resolution, there is a line that I have been using for the last three years: there is not a humanitarian solution to the political crisis. There has to be a political solution to the political crisis. As humanitarians, as noble as we are trying to appear or trying to be, we can only do what we can, given the circumstances in which we are operating. The dire circumstances in which we are operating make it extremely difficult to have any sense of sustained humanitarian action, even if there were levels of funding to sustain the amount of operations that we are doing inside Syria.
Amir Abdulla: May I just add one point? Clearly some of the movements that are controlling some of the areas have been categorised as terrorist organisations, with whom we cannot negotiate. For those with whom we can negotiate, we also try to negotiate through third parties, to the extent that the coordination mechanisms of the opposition through their coordination units, particularly in southern Turkey. We do have offices there and we attempt that. We had similar difficulties at a certain point in Somalia. At a certain point, there are groups, unfortunately, with whom we cannot negotiate. Then we get back to the issue of humanitarian law needing to take precedence.
Q10 Pauline Latham: Are these different groups easily identifiable by you?
Amir Abdulla: Not really. The groups are not easily identifiable and, even more so, neither are the areas they happen to be in control of at a particular point in time. It is one of the most complex situations that I have ever seen, in 20-odd years of doing this type of work.
Q11 Hugh Bayley: Could I just ask two further points about the UN Security Council resolution? The significant thing politically, of course, is that Russia and China are now backing the international UN Security Council initiative. What difference do you think that will make, in terms of access? Will Russia be exercising influence over the regime? What has caused their change of policy on the UN Security resolution? What can other governments do—for example, Turkey and others from the Gulf—to influence opposition groups to make this resolution make a difference in terms of access? Secondly, you mentioned, Mr Abdulla, air-freighting supplies in from Iraq. What would be needed to air-drop food into the pockets where you are simply unable to get access? I take Nigel Pont’s point about wanting to do humanitarian aid properly, but if you know no food has gone in for months and that people are extremely hungry, would it be feasible, logistically and militarily, to air-drop food to these small pockets?
Amir Abdulla: From a humanitarian perspective, it is difficult to work out what the political aims are. My hope is that everyone has recognised the humanitarian imperative of reaching a point in time where we have a pause, an opportunity to provide humanitarian relief that gives some space, perhaps, for a Geneva III to come down the road. I am not a political expert; I am a humanitarian. My hope is that China and Russia, and others who had hitherto perhaps not supported the resolution, recognise that the resolution can provide that space. Whilst that space is there now, it needs all parties to move forward and therefore it needs all sides in this to provide that humanitarian access and space.
One of the things about an air drop is that you really can only air-drop into a secure zone. Air drops into a zone where you do not have qualified people on the ground, who prepare a dropping zone and then a controlled distribution from that dropping zone, can actually end up doing more harm than good. We did an air bridge into the Al-Hasakah and Al-Qamishli area from Iraq. These were air lifts with planes landing and then the goods being distributed. Even in southern Sudan, at the height of the civil war there—and unfortunately things do not look so good at the moment—our air‑drop operations would rely on teams being flown in, in small planes first, securing a landing zone and a distribution site and then coming. That was when we were working in wide, open areas with large fields to drop in. Dropping over Aleppo, in a city, at time when usually what comes overhead is something dropping a barrel bomb, is probably not something that we would be able to do.
The real solution here is that all parties recognise that this resolution, while it does not provide a long-term end to the conflict, allows for a humanitarian pause. It allows people to get relief and for there to be some goodwill to be built on all sides. It is only on that that the sustainable, long-term solution can be built.
Nigel Pont: With regards to the resolution and Russia and China’s apparent endorsement now, I think the experience with the chemical weapons inspectors is instructive. Humanitarian organisations had about 100 visas in a queue for months to get into Damascus. When the decision was made that the weapons inspectors could come, they flocked to the border. Visas were issued on entrance and they were able to proceed to Damascus. Areas that had been sealed off from humanitarian organisations for almost a year were immediately made accessible to weapons inspectors. It is definitely possible, if there is the political will to do so. It is going to be relatively easy to see in the comings weeks and months whether this is actually making a major difference, particularly in the most hard-hit, besieged areas. If there are political decisions made to allow humanitarian assistance into these areas, it can be done.
With regard to the air drops, I want to emphasise a couple of points. The first is that having a really robust, on-the-ground distribution network is really important. Getting to your question regarding negotiations, making sure that our assistance is impartial and is not misused by different parties to the conflict is really important. That could be an option, if one was confident of the on-the-ground systems and then, obviously, of the more military side of securing the airspace in which to do such an operation.
Jehangir Malik: With regards to the humanitarian access, it is something the humanitarian organisations have been pushing from day one. It is noteworthy to congratulate Baroness Amos on her role in pushing for that, because she has been in direct communication with the NGO community here in the United Kingdom. Every time she has come to London, we have been pushing for that. I hope that has been useful in being able to provide the evidence as to how we can go about reaching the besieged cities.
Now, we have a resolution on besieged cities, but what we actually need is one on besieged regions. One city alone will not be able to give us the necessary access, but it is a positive start. By the same token, I think DFID’s role in the Syria crisis is to be extremely well commended, in the leadership role that it has played in facilitating, and ensuring that it is pushing not only other laggard donors but the pledges that were made in the Gulf and leading the way in providing vital assistance. I know that there is a lot of talk about international funding being used at home and so forth, but I think this vital funding, at this critical time, is absolutely a lifeline to the desperately needed people out there. We as humanitarian aid organisations would not be able to do half the job that we are doing without that kind of support. I think that should be noted.
Chair: Thank you. I think you have all shown how desperate and chaotic the situation is inside Syria. Perhaps we could move to the impact on the neighbours.
Q12 Fabian Hamilton: May I first pay tribute to the work of Islamic Relief? I have worked closely with your charity over many years in my constituency and I think you do a wonderful job. I have seen first-hand the work you did in Gaza, when I was there a few years ago. 15 months ago, I went to Yayladaği, a refugee camp in Turkey in the Hatay region, very close to the border. We were extremely moved by the plight of the children, men and women that we met. We were a bit shocked when one of the elected leaders of the Syrian community in the camp told us that the one thing that the UK could supply that would really make a difference would be ground-to-air missiles. That rather put it in perspective.
Jehangir Malik: It is something we get asked all the time.
Q13 Fabian Hamilton: I am sure you do, and it is not a humanitarian thing to do, but there we are. That highlighted the fact that it was air superiority that was the uneven factor in this conflict, because the Government clearly had that air superiority. It was ensuring it was doing the biggest damage possible to what they regarded as the insurgents. My question really, though, is about the neighbouring countries; I mentioned Turkey, but Jordan, obviously, and Lebanon as well. Do you think, and are you optimistic, that those neighbours will keep their borders open? The Turks are very ambivalent about the UNHCR being involved, or even the EU being involved, while at the same time criticising the UK for not doing enough. They have had a completely open-border policy for Syrians, many of whom live in local towns near the border freely, because they are regarded as guests. I do not know what the Lebanese or Jordanians do. I do know that Jordan is under some considerable pressure because of the numbers, which are swelling that small country’s population hugely and straining its resources. Are you optimistic that they will continue to accept refugees? What are the consequences if they do not?
Jehangir Malik: If I can touch just upon Turkey, and then maybe my colleagues can move on to Jordan and Lebanon. That is exactly the area that we operate in. Turkey has a very open‑door policy. We are able to enter into northern Syria and the besieged areas because of Turkey’s ability to grant us the necessary access. This is how I and my teams entered in, from Reyhanli, Hatay and across. With the potentially dire political consequences within their own countries, the efforts, again, of countries like Turkey have to be commended and supported. While there have been challenges of registering international NGOs in Turkey—many of us had had that challenge—the access that we do have from Turkey is something that is our only lifeline, at this moment in time, in being able to get to those areas.
Again, the children that we are trying to focus on and trying to get assistance to are absolutely critical. We have just started a £2 million, DFID-funded programme for children traumatised in Jordan. That is an area we will be focusing on. Again, I think Nigel will able to give testament to the strain on Lebanon. A year ago, we were feeling a sense of hospitality—when I was visiting the refugee camp, there was a sense of hospitality being extended by the locals. The extent to which that sense of hospitality will run out as financial circumstances change, and strain and sectarianism kick in, is something that we can take for granted. The Jordanian Ambassador was saying to us that they need much more support and much more assistance, in a difficult area like Jordan, to be able to continue the level of hospitality that they are trying to offer.
Q14 Fabian Hamilton: I have met the Jordanian Ambassador, as well. I can certainly verify that they are really desperate about the effects on the stability of their own country.
Jehangir Malik: Absolutely.
Nigel Pont: The situation in Lebanon is of greatest concern to us, with a quarter of the population now being refugees and only now, after 10 months, a Government having finally been formed. That Government may well do so, but it is yet to demonstrate any results in terms of making decisions on the really big thorny policy issues that they are grappling with. Meanwhile, refugees continue to flood across the border. As Jehangir was saying, there is a strong history of hospitality. After the 2006 war, a lot of Lebanese went into Syria, where they were very warmly hosted. That is reciprocated now, especially in places like the Bekaa Valley. If you can picture it, the Bekaa Valley is a patchwork of Sunni and Shia communities. The majority—not all—of the refugees coming over are Sunnis. There is a smaller border town called Akkar in north-eastern Lebanon. In that town, the population has more than doubled, if not tripled, in the past months. Particularly in the last six weeks or so the population has really exploded there, with refugees coming in. Where in the past you might have expected to see tensions primarily between different confessional groups, you are now even starting to see it amongst the Sunni community in that town. These tensions are starting to manifest themselves. The Mullahs in the mosques are starting to ask people to stay at home and not go out into the street because it is too crowded. There are all these various issues.
I think Lebanon is where we have most concern but Jordan is also of great concern to us. The subject of water in Jordan is particularly interesting in this context. Take a northern Jordanian border city such as Mafraq. Before the conflict started, Jordan was the fourth-most water scarce country in the world. It is now the third. These border cities had a municipal water supply before the refugees started arriving in the summer. Maybe once every three to six weeks they would receive enough municipal water to fill the rooftop tanks. That was before the population of their cities doubled or tripled. You can imagine what pressure just water alone places, let alone competition for jobs, rented apartments, and flats, and all the other social and economic pressures that are exerted in that environment. There is a lot that the international community can do right now, however, to pay particular attention to these issues. When we have limited resources, we are naturally inclined to focus them primarily on meeting the urgent, humanitarian needs at the time, which is natural and I think we have to do that. We need to continue to do that at the maximum possible scale.
That being said, there are some of these longer-term issues related to the stability and underlying chronic development issues in these host countries. If we do not take them on now, we will be really building up some serious problems for the future. The Conflict Pool has funded us for one project in Jordan which has been particularly successful. I will explain that to you to give an indication of what is possible. In six refugee-dense and host‑dense communities in northern Jordan, we formed joint committees of Syrian refugee leaders and Jordanian host community leaders. While they physically live as neighbours, there is not much social fabric or connectedness between these communities, so when tensions flare, there is not much to resort to—there are no mechanisms or experience of solving problems together to resort to, to address these problems. We have another Conflict Pool‑funded project in Iraq, where we have built a network of negotiation and mediation experts. We brought these trainers from Iraq to train these committees of Syrian and Jordanian refugee leaders in Jordan, in some basic interest-based negotiation skills. We then provided resources to these committees to address the priority needs that they identified as potential sources of friction and tension within those communities.
These committees started choosing projects, such as fixing a sports field for their kids, fixing up the school, building a new emergency ward at the local hospital and fixing the water system in the town—that sort of thing. That was very successful. We went back to one of these communities in Zaatari village. This was not the camp itself; there is a village there. We went back to Zaatari village a few weeks after we had completed some of these projects, and they told us the following story. There had been some problem with the wells, and so on, and as a result of the water pressures in the town, some actual fisticuffs had broken out between the local youth, as these tensions about the lack of water had escalated. This community committee that we had established came together, unbeknownst to us and without our prodding, they tamped out what was going on and they came up with a plan with the Government, the local private sector and other organisations such as us, to address the underlying causes that had set that off.
That is the sort of the thing that the British government, through the Conflict Pool, is already supporting. It is the sort of thing we would really encourage additional increased investment in now. There is really good value for money that we can have by investing in that stuff in all the border countries, at the same time as there is a continuation of addressing the urgent humanitarian needs.
Q15 Sir Tony Cunningham: Continuing the dialogue on neighbouring countries, could you tell us what forms of assistance your organisations are currently providing in places like Jordan and Lebanon? Does that assistance include programmes to address protection issues, such as sexual violence and child labour?
Amir Abdulla: Perhaps I will start. Together with the UNHCR and partners from the NGO community, we are providing food assistance or economic means for people to meet their food needs in the refugee communities in the neighbouring countries. In some of the camp situations where markets have not thrived, we are providing direct food assistance, but wherever possible, we have switched to providing cash or vouchers. We are moving more and more towards, basically, credit card‑type assistance, where people are buying food even in supermarkets. Many of these people are living in towns or town settings. In actual fact, we estimated that assistance has pumped about $300 million into the local economies of the neighbouring countries. In a sense, it is helping to at least stimulate some economic growth in those countries. Very much as Nigel has said, we are working to see where programmes can be done together with host communities. A lot can be done and needs to be done.
With specific attention to the protection issues, we recognise that in many of these camp settings the potential for gender-based violence is very high. We have positioned protection officers who work together with our food distribution teams or our monitoring teams, and work very closely with the UNHCR and others in that area. Both inside Syria and outside, wherever we have been distributing food—actually food in kind—we have done what we can to provide separate distribution mechanisms for women, women-headed households or women with children. We have also moved to a food parcel distribution mechanism, especially inside Syria but also in some of the camps. Our traditional distribution used to be to give a bag of this or a sack of that. We have now put these into actual boxed parcels, which make it much quicker for the individual. They do not have to queue for a long time, which also subjected them to potential harassments. Those are some of the direct issues, but we do recognise that it is a very difficult environment.
Q16 Sir Tony Cunningham: You talked about coordination. Are donor organisations well coordinated in these areas that you work in? It is so important.
Amir Abdulla: In every one of the countries we are operating in, there is a humanitarian country team led by the humanitarian coordinator. In most of those, if not all of them, the coordinating mechanisms provided by OCHA are certainly well-established. Donor representation at those meetings is almost always guaranteed. That is in-country. There are various coordinated mechanisms that take place at capital levels. The main actors within the humanitarian assistance have their emergency directors form a group, the emergency directors group. This is not just because he walked in, but John Ging, back there somewhere, coordinates that. It works very well. They meet regularly with donors. Coordination is taking place at various levels. I believe that in this crisis, with so many difficult things and so many things that can potentially go wrong, coordination has been one of the success stories.
Nigel Pont: May I add one point? On the humanitarian front, the coordination has been quite effective. Where we continue to face challenges is in how the development and those other funding streams are brought to bear in parallel with the humanitarian work that is going on in the same locations, addressing some of the same issues. It is not that that is not being worked on, but it is just a much more complicated issue. That sort of thing is incredibly challenging. We need to work on it more. Everybody is dealing with it, but it is a nut that has not yet been cracked. As the donors are working more, there is some work to be done. DFID is a particularly smart donor, and very helpful in terms of providing flexible long-term funding, which is particularly important because this crisis shifts. How it is going is so unpredictable, apart from getting worse. For organisations such as ours, rigidity does not enable us to respond well and adapt to changing circumstances. The more that DFID can continue to do what they are doing on that front, and also to encourage other donors to respond in a similar manner, the better.
Q17 Sir Tony Cunningham: I will put the next three questions together, to try to speed things up a little bit. Even inside Syria itself, you are planning a voucher programme targeting pregnant and lactating women. Are you confident that markets are functioning well enough for this to work? How would you monitor that vouchers are indeed used by these vulnerable groups? My final question is perhaps a difficult one: is there a risk that cash-based and voucher-based schemes might actually lead to inflation?
Amir Abdulla: On the voucher scheme for the pregnant and lactating women, the reason we feel confident enough to do that is that those vouchers will only be redeemed against a specific product; it is a nutritious product or products. Therefore, we feel safe enough that as long as that supply is assured, it would not lead to inflation. Those vouchers will not be chasing other products. What we will be doing is monitoring the supply of those products. It is very much a pilot initiative, and I do not think it would be easy to take it to scale without it potentially causing inflation. That is why inside Syria, for now, we maintain that our main method of operation is actually bringing food in, break bulk, turning it into those parcels I mentioned and distributing those. In the context of Syria, trying to do large‑scale cash or voucher programmes would be highly inflationary. This is very targeted and very specific. That is why we are reasonably confident.
Jehangir Malik: Cash-handling inside Syria is of course a hugely dangerous affair. The best, safest mechanism is to purchase the supplies outside, stock them as close as possible, get those supplies in and move in. There is then less likelihood of cash falling into the wrong hands and so forth, or being misused in any shape or form, for something other than the intended humanitarian use. Therefore, I think most of the humanitarian agencies will focus upon making sure that we get the humanitarian aid supplies inside of Syria purchased outside.
Q18 Chris White: Good morning. According to the UNHCR, some 85% of refugees across the region are based in urban areas outside the more formal refugee camps. In your view, does this make it more difficult and challenging to provide humanitarian aid and assistance? Are organisations sufficiently prepared to adapt their support to more urban environments? That is really for all of you.
Amir Abdulla: Speaking from the World Food Programme’s perspective, that is why we accelerated our move towards not only a cash/voucher programme but also an electronic card system. This allows people either to receive their assistance directly through ATM machines, so they would actually get cash, or they would be able to use those cards in certain supermarkets and redeem. Talking about every cloud having a silver lining, what this operation has done is allowed the WFP and the UNHCR to forge ahead together, to try to come up with a common platform and a one-card system. Rather than one giving it one way and another giving it another way, we are trying to reduce some overhead costs by having just a single, common platform for working on that.
We are experimenting and piloting in different countries with different methods. We are hoping that from this, a potential common platform system would come. We have had to accelerate those, but I think that we have, by and large, met the challenge. It introduces some complexities but I think we have had some innovation from this operation.
Jehangir Malik: Our experience with delivering on behalf of the World Food Programme in Jordan and Lebanon is that the cash system allows the refugees to access the different retail outlets, to be able to purchase what they need. This is much more suitable for the environment in which we are operating. The challenge that we do face, and have been facing from day one, is one of accommodation—where they will be housed. This is difficult to contend with. I have seen some horrific dwellings in monitoring and evaluation visits in Jordan and in Lebanon. It is primarily because people have left their homes with no money at all, and the cost of living inside Lebanon and Jordan is extremely high. It is $300 minimum for a room in some of these locations. The refugees do not have that kind of cash. That creates a major dilemma. Nigel, I am not sure if you want to shed any light on that side of things in Lebanon.
Nigel Pont: It is a fantastic question, because in all honesty it is easier when refugees are clustered together in a camp. It is much easier to provide services in that setting. We have seen in Jordan how a disproportionate level of assistance has gone into the Zaatari camp in particular, compared to the numbers that exist in the host communities. It is definitely a phenomenon. The 75% living outside of camps that we are noticing is definitely a big challenge that the community is working to deal with. As Amir and Jehangir are saying, a lot of progress has been made. In this environment, figuring out how to do so cost‑effectively, given the limited funding and the growing needs, is a challenge that is going to remain. It is something that people are working on, but it is yet to be resolved.
Q19 Chris White: This might be a bit more of a naïve question: why do you think it is that such a high proportion are not using the camps, as you say, which would be much easier? Why are they going to the urban areas, which you say have dwellings of perhaps a very poor, substandard quality?
Jehangir Malik: I do not think Jordan and Lebanon want camps, with the risk of them becoming permanent settlements. We have seen that in other conflicts, where in protracted crises these camps turn into longer-term cities, towns and dwellings; there is that political factor. There are limited camps to go to, and different responses in Jordan and Lebanon. Also, people from inside Syria are largely living in urban settings. It was a middle-income country and so forth. It was not the situation that they were living in settlements and could just adjust their lifestyle and set themselves into camps. There are obviously family relationships that spread beyond Syria and into Lebanon, Jordan and so forth. They dwell in such places in urban settings.
Q20 Chris White: Just one more, quick question. From what I understand from your answer, this would be a preference of the urban communities. If that is the case, do you think these host communities should be included in the aid programme?
Jehangir Malik: That is a really challenging question. There would have to be some kind of mechanism. We found it difficult to provide the sums of money that are needed, because, at the end of the day, you are providing landlords with extra funding that is required to be able to house these refugees. That is a very challenging scenario that we are exploring. I do not think that the international humanitarian community has cracked what is the best, cost-effective method. To house the 75% of refugees that are not in camps is a very expensive programme to administer. There is no easy answer for that one, unfortunately.
Amir Abdulla: There is no easy answer. I think that certain programmes that can improve the accommodations and living conditions of the areas within the host communities are going to be needed, such as the type of water projects that Nigel had mentioned, potential improvement in education and some social protection-type projects for host communities. As Nigel already mentioned, the immediate humanitarian assistance has been well coordinated and is there. Planning for the longer-term is more complex and is a little bit more difficult to pull together. Sometimes, it is more difficult to coordinate and combine developmental funding activities than it is to do what we have been able to do within the humanitarian sphere. Having said that, I think it is incumbent upon all of us to find a way to do it.
Nigel Pont: Basically, we need to invest more in host communities. That is the bottom line. It has to be done, or we will see the tensions rise in the future. Despite the resource constraints, resources need to be prioritised for those activities. There are a lot of incredibly poor, local families who are seeing high levels of assistance, unmatched by local social security services, going to target refugee families. This is exacerbating the situation. I think the humanitarian and the development community at large needs to figure out a way to do more for host communities.
Q21 Peter Luff: There has been some domestic political controversy in the UK; I hope you will agree that the UK’s financial contribution to the humanitarian relief effort has been significant, by any standards. That has often been overshadowed by its reluctance to take part in the UNHCR resettlement programme. Ministers have described the resettlement programme as just having a “token impact”. What is your view of the balance of the UK’s engagement with the UNHCR’s resettlement programme?
Nigel Pont: I am not particularly familiar with it, to be honest. My opinion is that there are some cases of extreme vulnerability where certain families and certain individuals need particular assistance from a protection perspective. The more opportunities there are for that, the better. I am afraid I am not familiar with the specifics of the situation in the UK.
Amir Abdulla: Likewise, I am not particularly familiar with that.
Q22 Peter Luff: Do you support the principle of taking very vulnerable individuals out of the conflict zone and out of the refugee camps and bringing them to a Western country?
Amir Abdulla: In principle, absolutely. If the individuals desire to be resettled, then obviously the ideal is that people return to their places of origin, especially those who want to. You will note that in many discussions, many of the Syrian refugees just want to go home. That is what they say they want to do. But in terms of the principle, I would definitely support it.
If I could also pick up on your first point about the level of contribution, DFID’s intervention across the board in the Syrian operation has been remarkable. For the WFP, it has been remarkable. We would not have been able to manage our operation without the second largest donor. When you put the size of the contribution against the per capita GDP in the economy, it outranks anybody else; I can assure you of that.
People have often said about how expensive it is. I would like to put in some context, just to leave you with one thought on the cost of this operation from a WFP perspective. We have a staggering number that says if we reach everybody that we are trying to, this operation costs on the order of $42 million per week. However, that reaches about 6 million people. Rounded up, that translates to $1 a day—65p per day—which is a lot less than you would spend on a cup of coffee—to deliver food in what is basically a war zone. When you look at the macro numbers, it is staggering. When you recognise what we are managing to do with the very generous contribution from the UK people—it comes through the UK Government, but this money does come from UK individuals; it is their taxes that support this effort—what we are talking about is that for less than a cup of coffee per day, we are managing to deliver food sustenance in what is basically a war zone.
Q23 Chair: It has been reported, in The Times and elsewhere, that groups have been springing up in the UK and elsewhere on the back of this crisis, masquerading, if you like, as humanitarian relief but purportedly actually being cover for extremist groups. All I am really asking is whether you have any direct awareness or knowledge of that happening. These are allegations; these are reports. Do you have any direct evidence?
Amir Abdulla: Not directly.
Jehangir Malik: What I am seeing here is a repeat of the phenomena that I experienced at the beginning of my introduction to the humanitarian field. That was in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. It was the sort of scenario where there was a protracted crisis and what appeared to be an international community failure in not being able to deal with the crisis in Bosnia. We can draw some parallels to what we have got in Syria. The Syrian diaspora community, settled here for quite some time, started out by doing humanitarian responses to the crisis. This has now gone beyond the Syrian diaspora community to various other communities. The Charity Commission issued a regulatory alert on convoys leaving from the UK, humanitarian missions and guidance. We at Islamic Relief, a member of the Muslim Charities Forum, have been engaged with the Charities Commission since the beginning of this crisis, trying to put out messages to ensure what is safe to give in a conflict zone, what is safe for the environment, what to do and what not to do. We are working closely alongside the Charity Commission to try to provide this.
Of course, not everyone is going to take heed of that advice, as it were. Therefore, you are seeing a growth of sporadic, individual efforts. I do not think it is organised in any shape or form. It is a knee-jerk reaction to what is seen as an international failure to do our bit. You are getting medics, individuals, humanitarians, suppliers and locals trying to do what they can to try to provide humanitarian assistance. That has resulted in the phenomenon of local humanitarian convoys making their way across land, from Turkey into southern parts. I have no figures to say what part of that is humanitarian and non-humanitarian, but I do recognise that there is an increase in this phenomenon.
Chair: Some of it is genuine, but some of it may not be. I take that point.
Q24 Mr McCann: I think we are all very proud of the fact that the UK Government has provided a huge sum of money for the humanitarian aid relief in this tragic conflict. Given the dollar-a-day scenario that you are talking about, the cup-of-coffee idea, I dare say you will tell me that the money is being well spent. There are other countries in the world who are not stepping up to the plate, we would argue—countries who have had a significant historical interest in this particular part of the world. I have two questions: what would you do or say to encourage those countries to be more proactive in providing larger sums of money for the humanitarian relief effort? In terms of the conflict, with no end in sight to the violence in this tragic conflict, what do we do when the money runs out? How long will the international community sustain the money? How long can we keep paying $42 million a week? Do you have any opinions on those issues?
Amir Abdulla: I am speaking from the WFP perspective. The Syria operation includes the neighbouring countries. That $42 million is for the whole operation, inside and outside. That represents over a third of our planned budget. Given that the World Food Programme is voluntarily funded, so we do not always achieve all of our plans, a normal estimated contribution level in a year would be in the order of just over $4 billion. The $42 million per week comes to $2 billion. We see over half of the income, or the contribution level, that we would anticipate getting in a year spent on one operation. If we are to meet all those needs—and all needs are important—there would be a lot of other needs that we would be unable to meet. It definitely has an impact. It is not sustainable. Jehangir mentioned that there is no humanitarian solution to this political crisis. As I said earlier, my hope is that the Security Council resolution will give a pause. The pause will allow for some relief, to access certain areas. That relief will allow people to realise that there has to be a longer-term political solution; that is for others to reach.
In answer to the first part of your question, I can assure you that we are reaching out to all of our donor countries—those who have regularly given to us and those who we believe should be giving more. Our Executive Director has written to them and had visits with them. We rely very heavily also on the Emergency Relief Coordinator, Baroness Amos, in her efforts. She has been untiring in her efforts to reach out not only to those who are giving and giving generously, such as the UK, and asking them to please sustain it, but to those who perhaps who have not yet given as much as they could or should. We are reaching out there, but it is not sustainable. We need a political solution. There is so much need in the world and there are so many other, longer-term initiatives that we must also implement. The day this conflict ends, there will still be huge investment that will be needed for recovery. I have no doubt that will probably come from another forum.
Chair: Thank you very much. As Michael has said, we are proud of our Government’s response and we appreciate how important it is. We also recognise that this would not normally be a priority for our aid development projects. It does eventually come from other more needy parts of the world. We face the same dilemma that you do. We also recognise that a solution is required. Some degree of political humanity, if you like, needs to intervene, but we are all powerless in the present circumstances. Thank you very much indeed, firstly for coming and sharing your experiences with us, but also for what you do. We appreciate that you are operating in difficult, chaotic circumstances where pretty much every obstacle you can think of is being put in your way. Also, the people who work for you are clearly operating in difficult and extremely dangerous circumstances. We would like to put on record that we appreciate their dedication in this situation. Thank you very much indeed.
Amir Abdulla: We will pass that message on to them. Thank you.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: John Ging, Director of Coordination Response Division, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Margot Ellis, Deputy Commissioner General, UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and Daniel Levy, Director of Middle East and North Africa Programme, European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), gave evidence.
Chair: Thank you very much for coming in. I apologise we have kept you waiting but I hope you will appreciate both an important issue and one where we need to hear the answers. At the same time, if I can say at the start, I think some colleagues will probably have to leave by about 12.30. If all of us can perhaps move things along, although I do not want to inhibit you from telling us what you need to say, as that is important. Perhaps, again, for the record, if you could just introduce yourselves.
Margot Ellis: Good morning. My name is Margot Ellis. I am the Deputy Commissioner General of UNRWA.
John Ging: My name is John Ging. I am the Director of Operations for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, out of New York.
Daniel Levy: I am Daniel Levy. I direct the Middle East and North Africa programme for a think-tank here called the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Q25 Chair: Thank you very much. Perhaps just very briefly, we are looking at the occupied territories. This Committee has done a report in a previous Parliament, about six years ago, and we are returning to it, partly in the context of the extent to which the Syrian conflict has impacted on it, but also in its own right, given it has been going on, in one form or another, for an awfully long time. Briefly, I wondered if you could give us a view of DFID’s role in the occupied territories and how effective you think it has been. We will have more detailed questions to follow up, so it is just a general feeling of how DFID fits into that process, and how effectively.
Margot Ellis: Thank you very much. Do you mean specifically with regard to the OPT?
Chair: Yes.
Margot Ellis: We appreciate the very generous donations provided to us by DFID that are channelled from British taxpayers. DFID has rightly earned a reputation among its beneficiaries and intermediary agencies as a smart, intelligent donor. I say this from the perspective of one who prior to working for UNRWA, worked for 23 years for USAID, so I think I share. It holds us accountable in the sense that it provides a performance-based budget to us. About a third of the budget that is provided to UNRWA for our operation is performance‑based, so it holds us to account for results. I also think it is good in that it provides predictable, multiyear funding for our operation in the OPT.
I think it is important to say what our operation is about. We have a specific mandate. We are a regional organisation. We provide for the needs of Palestine refugees in five fields of operation, so it is not just in the West Bank and Gaza, but also in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. We are serving the needs of 5 million Palestine refugees who need assistance. I am very proud to be working for UNRWA, because we are a developmental and humanitarian agency working in a highly politicised environment. However, thanks to the assistance provided through DFID and other donors, we are able to provide education for 500,000 children—I think we have the largest school system that we run in the Middle East. Last year alone, in terms of Palestine refugees, we catered to 10 million patient visits at our 139 clinics that we run. We run a very successful microfinance programme and, over the last 20 years, we have lent more than $300 million in small loans up to $1,000 to promote the self-reliance and resilience of Palestine refugees in our five fields of operation. We also have a Relief and Social Services programme that caters to the needs of the most vulnerable, where we provide food and cash assistance.
I think it is important to note that, although we are a humanitarian agency, the reason that we exist, our mandate and our continued existence is because of the failure of political actors to come to a just and durable solution to the Palestine—
Q26 Chair: I was going to say: what you are describing is the sort of things that a functioning government should be providing.
Margot Ellis: Exactly. We are a quasi-governmental agency in that sense, because, typically, a government would provide the types of service that we provide; however, in terms of our financing, we do not have a tax base, so we do not enjoy that. In terms of providing a sense of stability in the region and promoting the socioeconomic conditions of Palestine refugees who can promote their own resilience, I think we are an important stabilising force in the region.
Daniel Levy: Thank you for inviting me. I think there is a donor consensus in terms of how one approaches the Occupied Palestinian Territories in this situation, which DFID is part of. Within that, DFID is a significant donor and a respected donor, and is considered a smart donor. The way I would frame it is to think of the role most in terms of keeping options open. Looking at this conflict, I am not convinced—and I think 20 years is the period of time since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority—that you can make such a powerful argument that state-building is succeeding, because state-building requires the withdrawal of the occupying power, and that has not happened through the 20 years of the Oslo process. What you have seen, however, is the maintenance of an environment in which the possibility of a political, negotiated solution still exists. I think that is quite an achievement.
There will be criticism from both sides as to the price paid for that. Palestinian voices will say, “You are buying our quiet and, absent donor dependency, we could have a more assertive strategy to achieve freedom.” Israelis will say, “You are sustaining an authority that continues to do things that we are unhappy with and that may cut against a peaceful solution.” I think, in your visit, you will find a more trenchant criticism coming from Palestinian civil society, and I think that the Israeli establishment consensus—and especially the security establishment consensus—would baulk at the idea and would be very nervous of the idea of not having a Palestinian Authority there and not having Palestinian security forces there. For all the criticism, I think Israel continues to almost always transfer tax revenues. Israel could collapse the PA if it wanted.
The signature achievement is that this is an environment where, yes, there is violence, there is suffering and there is deprivation, all of which could be prevented and should be, but it is limited conflict and it is limited violence. The window to negotiations is kept open by the kinds of things that UNRWA is doing, by poverty alleviation and by Palestinians being on a PA salary sheet, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza. If you look around the rest of the region, that perhaps begins to look like a more significant achievement than it might otherwise be considered to be, and DFID has been very important in that.
John Ging: I think my colleagues have set out it very well. I would just say that it is all about human development. The Middle East is a very beautiful place. The problem is that the people have difficulty in living together and finding solutions to do so. We should not be distracted by those political failures from our obligation to focus on what else we can do to help with human development, because it is through the development of human beings, starting with education but also the creation of a prospect for a future that is hopeful of economic wellbeing and so forth, that that will lay the foundation for the solutions that are needed to resolve this conflict. There is no easy way of resolving those complexities and it has defied solution for a long time.
However, as I said, when we look at the investment—and this is why we all so very much appreciate how DFID has been one of the largest investors in human development, in the human beings, in the Middle East through the programming and its cross-sectoral programming—as Daniel has said, it would be much worse if we did not have that investment and commitment down through the years. We point to the work that UNRWA and others are doing to show that it is not a hopeless situation. However difficult it might be, it is not hopeless, and that is what we would encourage you to continue to do: to stay invested, to stay committed and to stay with the people.
Q27 Fabian Hamilton: In September 2013, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact published a report on DFID’s funding to UNRWA, and concluded that DFID was able to achieve a significant impact on the lives of Palestinian refugees through its support to UNRWA. However, ICAI also found that “there is a cumbersome management structure; there is little formal participation in governance by beneficiaries; and reform is driven from the top by UNRWA management staff.” My question is addressed to Margot Ellis: between 2012 and 2015, DFID is providing $106.5 million to UNRWA, yet ICAI, as I have said, recently found that there is this “cumbersome management structure” and “little formal participation.” How would you respond and how did you respond to that criticism?
Margot Ellis: Thank you for the comment. I think we have taken the recommendations of the report to heart, and the most discrete thing that we are focusing on, in partnership with DFID, is how we approach our medium-term strategy. Our next six-year strategy covers the period 2016-2021, and we are working in close partnership with DFID.
There are specific resources that have been committed by DFID to help us in this process to ensure that it is a very consultative process. It is not just UNRWA staff developing a strategy for Palestine refugees for the six-year period, but making sure that there is adequate consultation with, ultimately, the beneficiaries—the refugees themselves. DFID is funding a planning officer—that individual is on board right now—to strengthen our capacity to plan and to consult. They are also providing us technical assistance for the poverty strategy, with a specific focus on beneficiary engagement and strengthening the evaluation function. I think we are operationalising the recommendations and, moving forward, we agree with the recommendations. At the end of the day, we want a strategy that is forward-leaning and beneficial to Palestine refugees, but also one that addresses the concerns of donors as well as the countries that host the refugees.
Q28 Fabian Hamilton: Was ICAI’s contribution helpful to you? It is never nice to receive that kind of criticism, but if it is genuine and it helps you to do your job better, then it might be beneficial.
Margot Ellis: It was. I think, overall, the report was very positive. The bottom line of the report was that this is a good investment of British taxpayer money. UNRWA and DFID are learning organisations, so there is always room for improvement, and that is why we appreciate the assistance provided by DFID being performance-based. It sets some standards for us, especially on our reform-related activities. We have a very holistic process in the area of education reform, as well as health-sector reform. It sets a bar for us against which we have to meet some standards in terms of how to improve our delivery system.
I will just give you an example of the type of indicator that we are working on and that is a benchmark or an indicator for DFID: patient consultations—how many patients a doctor sees a day. This is one of the things that we are trying to reform as part of our health reform programme in order to improve the quality of care. Prior to the start of the programme, the average physician would see 101 patients per day; we brought it down to 88 patients per day. This is one of the things that we are working in partnership with DFID on. There is always room for improvement. We like the fact that DFID comes to us with specific recommendations on how to improve.
Q29 Mr McCann: Good morning. In the years 2011-2015, DFID will provide £122 million in direct funding to the Palestinian Authority through the World Bank. Do you think that is a good idea?
Daniel Levy: Do you mean the “through the World Bank” or the £122 million?
Mr McCann: The direct funding and whether or not it is a good idea—direct to the Palestinian Authority.
Daniel Levy: For me, it goes back to this question of what the overall goal here is. We have more or less four choices: one would be to acknowledge that this is not a development question. You cannot build a state under occupation. We have tried to for 20 years. We have to roll our sleeves up and make some of the political hard choices that have, taking the approach that we have currently taken, in a way, made it easier to avoid. Then one can go one of two ways with that. One can either say, “We are throwing good money after bad until Israel ends the occupation, if the two-state model is the one we pursue.” Therefore, what leverage do we have with the Israelis? Those who follow the debates in the Israeli press closely will see that it is not offers of greater partnership from Europe that grab the Israelis’ attention; it is threats of sanctioning from Europe that get the attention of Israelis.
I will be brief but I think it is the only way I can fairly approach your question. You have this stream of Israeli centrist politicians—those more embracing of two states, from the leader of the opposition to Minister Livni, who you may be familiar with, to former Prime Ministers Olmert and Barak—saying, “If we do not make peace, the world will impose costs on us and we will become a pariah,” presumably assuming that the Israeli public will respond if that starts to happen. That is around how one uses leverage with Israel.
A second alternative is to say, “This is not a development. This is not worth supporting the PA. Let’s go along with what, apparently, Israel is intending to do after almost 50 years of being in these territories. It is Israeli. There is not going to be space for a Palestinian state. There are hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers beyond the Green Line. Why invest in an alternative quasi-state structure for 20 years? Let’s say to the Israelis, ‘We accept it. This is yours. It is your responsibility.’” Some people may feel less comfortable with Palestinians there not having full rights; some people may be more okay with that, but it is up to you. If there is then, as former Israeli prime ministers have suggested, an anti‑apartheid campaign, which is what former PMs Barak and Olmert talked about, we will have to decide how to relate to that. It is a kind of, “Get on with it. We are pulling back from this.”
I think there are only two other options, if one does not want to go down that path. One is you continue to do what you have been doing, and look at this not as 20 years of failure but as 20 years of keeping an option alive, which is why you will be pulled into a blame game when you visit. Both sides will try to say to you, “That side is doing this; that side is doing that.” There is an asymmetry of power, which is the headline that one cannot avoid acknowledging. There is international law that comes into play. There is an occupying power and occupied people. Both sides, however, want to maintain this option at the moment. The political strategy of the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is to say, “This is the least bad option. Let’s still have a degree of Palestinian self-governance and let’s try to not let this spiral out of control.”
Mr McCann: I can maybe add another bit in to perhaps speed up the process. In terms of the integrity of DFID—
Peter Luff: Sorry; was there a fourth strand?
Daniel Levy: Very briefly, the fourth option: I think there are some ways in which you can tie the two together. Making some of this assistance more politically meaningful relates to things in Area C and East Jerusalem, and I think DFID is beginning to do some of those things. They have to keep it at a level that can allow you to do everything else, but a little more leaning in that direction would be useful.
Q30 Mr McCann: To be clear, this is about DFID’s integrity. Margot and John can come in here. DFID is about poverty alleviation, and we supply direct budgets to support a range of countries through our bilateral programmes. We have also withdrawn budget support when governments have, in our opinion, misbehaved. When it comes to the Palestinian Authority and that £122 million of direct support, whilst President Abbas says that he opposes violence, we have received irrefutable evidence that he honours individuals who are convicted terrorists who have killed Israelis, that he is paying prisoners’ families from budget support on a sliding scale, depending upon how heinous the crime is, and that the money is used through education to demonise Jewish people. In another set of circumstances, then, it is difficult not to imagine that the British Government, through DFID, would withdraw budget support. The question is: are we in different territory here? Is it just because of the political issues on the ground that we are continuing? Do you believe that the money is being well spent?
John Ging: If I might, Daniel has set out very well the political challenge and the political dilemmas of political leadership, but let us now come down to what has been decided and what we are trying to make work. From our perspective, we would say that DFID is making absolutely the right choice to invest, as it is directing its investment through, in this instance, the Palestinian Authority. It is also correct that that must be challenged in terms of the integrity—the issues that you highlight need to be addressed. I would suggest that the prisoners who are in prison are paying the price of their crime; their families should not be paying a price for the sins of their parents. If it is a poverty-alleviation programme, then, it should be on the basis of the need of the children and whoever else are the dependants or in need, irrespective of the crimes of their parents. The issue of education—
Q31 Mr McCann: Can I just stop you, because this is really important? Nobody in our society would accept a salary being paid to the family of someone convicted of a crime, whether a rapist or a murderer or whatever. The point is that the state then looks after them in terms of the welfare provisions that are put in place. Nobody is arguing about that, but this is specifically about individuals being paid a salary, or their family being paid a salary, whilst they are in prison, and they get more money, depending upon how serious the crime is.
John Ging: Again, there should be accountability around how your money is paid out. What I am saying is that, from a humanitarian perspective, the global standard is that we assess need and we address the needs. That should be the standard against which the Palestinian Authority, if it is using your funds under a programme of poverty alleviation, should have to account for the use of that money. I do not think we are having any difference of view on that.
In terms of the education programme, again there has to be accountability within the education programme on both sides of this conflict to ensure that education is not a tool of socialisation that radicalises, incites or enhances animosity or division. Education is supposed to develop, to be positive and to create understanding and tolerance and so forth. I know that my colleagues in UNRWA are very actively promoting human rights through their education programme. Are the textbooks on either side ideal? No, they are not, and there have been many studies on this. Again, let us hold the leadership to account. The children are vulnerable to influence through the education system, and this is the future.
Again, we would absolutely agree that there should be a high bar of accountability, but let us not look at it in isolation. There are two parties in this conflict, and let us address it in a way that ensures that the education that the kids are getting on both sides is the education that will create a better understanding and higher levels of tolerance. One also has to accept and acknowledge that there will be nationalism and a historical perspective. There will be national pride and so forth, which is also part of the education system in any country.
Q32 Mr McCann: The thing is that we do not provide any money to the Israeli Government. We provide it to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Perhaps Margot wants to comment in terms of taking it a bit further. In terms of money being spent appropriately or inappropriately, or not on poverty alleviation, how do we hold the Palestinian Authority to account? Can you give examples of how that is being done on the back of John’s comments?
Margot Ellis: Thank you very much. A few comments: I first want to take a step back and get back to Daniel’s comment—especially when you come out and meet with leaders—about the urgency of the assistance programme as well as the urgency of coming to a political solution. I worked earlier in the region, dating back to 1999. I regularly went to the West Bank and Gaza, and I return regularly now, of course. In terms of what we risk right now, you have a dying generation of Palestinian businessmen in Gaza who still believe in a two‑state solution. Why do I say it is a dying generation? It is because Palestinians and Israelis do not know each other anymore.
When I previously worked on the OPT portfolio, I lived in Tel Aviv, so I often had occasion to dine with Israelis. Inevitably, they would say, “You are working with the Palestinians?” and look aghast at me. I can confidently say that, within 10 minutes, everyone around the table would realise, “My father has a Palestinian business partner,” or “I went to school with a Palestinian.” Every Israeli around the table had some type of personal connection with a Palestinian, but I cannot say that today, because Palestinians only know Israelis as soldiers, and Israelis only know Palestinians as terrorists or, in the past, as suicide bombers. That personal connection is no longer there. There is a ticking time bomb for the potential for a two-state solution, because the people-to-people connection is not there.
You talk about the DFID programme and its focus on poverty alleviation. If you look at the statistics in the West Bank and Gaza, they are not like they were 10 years ago. If you were to look at those statistics alone, it would probably warrant DFID investing, beside the connection with stability which I tried to make before. More than 70% of the population of Gaza is now dependent on humanitarian assistance. Go back to 2000: only 10% was. Why? Because of the manmade situation of a manmade blockade. Recent statistics: 57% of the population in the Gaza strip is food-insecure right now, and that is with the food assistance that is provided whether by the WFP or UNRWA. There is another 14% in the Gaza strip that are vulnerable to food insecurity.
Q33 Mr McCann: I think that is going into a different subject. I was just trying to hone in on the Palestinian Authority and whether you feel that that money is making a difference and is working.
Daniel Levy: Could I just address that directly for a moment? I am quite sensitive to anti-Semitic stereotypes, and I think it is something that has to be taken on. You are right: you do not fund the Israeli education system, so whatever one might find there is not pertinent to this conversation. What is pertinent, and what makes this a very distinct kind of funding pool, is that we are not in a post-conflict peace, truth and reconciliation phase between Israelis and Palestinians. We are deep in the conflict, and the driving narrative on both sides is still a deeply destructive one. Does that mean that one should not take a microscope to what is being taught? It does not, but it also means that one cannot de-Palestinianise what the Palestinian Authority does, because that is not going to serve anyone.
The idea that you could have, at this stage in the conflict, a Palestinian Authority that does not treat its prisoners in a certain way, I do not think can exist with the reality we are in. If you asked the Northern Ireland warring parties to disavow the people of violence at the wrong moment in that process, one would have undermined that process. I think it is a real challenge for international donors and for support for the PA, but one has to understand that we are bringing, in some respects, post-conflict tools to bear in a space that is still deeply in conflict. We de-Palestinianise the PA at our own peril, because the less credibility and legitimacy we impose on it vis-à-vis its own public, the less useful it is, to be honest, for the main purpose it is designed for, which is to be a vehicle for making a peace deal. I cannot be more sympathetic to the place your question is coming from and I cannot be more cautioning of where one might go if one takes that logic too far.
Q34 Mr McCann: I have not got any other questions. I just want to make this point for the record: this is about being honest with the British people about how their money is being spent. That is what it is about; whether it is correct or not is a different matter. The way you have answered the question is that you have expressed what we are trying to achieve.
Daniel Levy: Except, on the money, as I understand it, there has never been a “gotcha” moment of DFID money going to a textbook that has been found to—
Chair: We will obviously pursue this with other witnesses and when we are there. I think Mr McCann is raising perfectly good questions that we need to answer, but you are also giving some very good arguments to put it in context, which are genuinely really helpful.
Q35 Chris White: On a slightly different topic, we have been told that, since the blockade of Gaza began, 60% of Gaza’s businesses have closed down. Do you regard the blockade as a constraint on the Palestinian economy? Could also answer whether it is going to be possible to lift the blockade whilst, at the same time, satisfying Israeli security needs?
John Ging: I will just kick off this one. Building on what Margot has said, prior to the blockade—and it is sometimes forgotten that the blockade was imposed when Gilad Shalit was kidnapped, but it was not lifted when Gilad Shalit was released. The blockade has had the most devastatingly destructive impact on the Gaza strip. As Margot has said, it is not just economic in its impact, but it is the linkage that is the foundation of the cooperation between the business sector in Gaza and the business sector in Israel.
What the blockade has done systematically is disempowered and impoverished the business community, who were in a mutually productive relationship with its partners on the Israeli side. They were creating employment in the Gaza strip predicated on those good relationships. They were providing a situation where the youth of Gaza had to make a choice: if you worked in a business that was affiliated and working through that partnership, you could not be involved in violence because, again, all of the network was set up. The security clearances and the vetting—all of these things—ensured that there was a high level of integrity around compliance with security standards and so forth.
Yet when the blockade was put in place, what we saw in parallel was the development of a tunnel economy through Egypt. Those who controlled the tunnel economy were the people who had the guns in their hands and who had their focus on violence, rather than on peace, peaceful coexistence, and mutual economic engagement and reinforcement. So, absolutely, the blockade of Gaza needs to be looked at from the point of view of breaking that link Margot was talking about between the economic base in Israel and the economic base in Gaza and all the consequences that then flow from that, which are entirely negative.
Can Israel secure its borders while having trade flowing? Yes, they have shown that they can do it. They do it every day. There are humanitarian supplies going into Gaza and, let us be clear, if flour, milk, bread and so forth can cross into Gaza, so too can commercial goods. Is there a risk attached to this? Absolutely. Those who do not want the business links between Israel and Gaza within the Gaza strip will and do target those crossing points. Closing those crossing points is a victory for them, so, again, that is the equation that is there.
It is not an easy issue, but the bottom line is that the consequences are not just devastating from a humanitarian perspective, in terms of the impoverishment of the people of the Gaza strip; it is the impoverishment of those relationships that are the foundation for the stabilisation, the development of the peace and the coexistence that we saw as the foundation of Europe after the second world war. The economic links were seen to be the key to stability and progress.
Q36 Chris White: Can I just ask you to clarify that? Are you saying that the security situation, or the severity of the security situation, would be lower if the blockade was removed?
John Ging: I am saying two things: one is that there is no future, in many of our views, for a peaceful relationship between the peoples of Palestine and Israel unless there are economic links that are mutually productive and self-reinforcing.
Q37 Chris White: So just to go back, would the security situation be a lower risk if the blockade was removed?
John Ging: The security situation could continue to deteriorate as long as we continue in this direction. There is no question about that—none whatsoever. Does that mean that it will be easy? No, because in Palestine, as in Israel, there are those who are opposed to a peaceful resolution to this conflict. They believe in conflict and have done for decades. Those who believe in conflict are succeeding when the reaction is to blockade 1.5 million people.
Chris White: For the record, I will not ask my question for the third time.
Margot Ellis: I think the best thing that Israel could do for its own security is to allow exports. Right now, as of 2010, Israel starting to improve the import regime into the Gaza strip. But imports going into the Gaza strip are still at 40% of pre-2007 levels. On exports going out of the Gaza strip, we are talking about fewer than 200 trucks a year. It is less than 2% of what was agreed on and what was experienced pre-2007.
So what you have done is you have strangulated the economy in the Gaza strip. What is particularly surprising is that the Dutch Government recently donated a scanner for Kerem Shalom—the one remaining crossing point to the Gaza strip—for exports, to allow safe export. The Israelis refused to use this scanner; ask them why. The Israelis have turned the Gaza strip into a dependent, consumption-led economy. The Palestinian people are very entrepreneurial. Let the economy thrive the way it did before. There were exports to Europe and to the United States—textiles, furniture exports, horticultural products. Allow an economic recovery and that is the best investment that Israel can have in its own security. Having an impoverished, marginalised population in Gaza is the worst thing to have at Israel's doorstep in terms of promoting insecurity.
Q38 Fabian Hamilton: Surely the Egyptians bear some responsibility too.
Daniel Levy: What worries me about this situation is that you add to the pool of those with an ideological interest in maintaining the conflict those who develop a commercial interest in maintaining the conflict. I think the trajectory of what has happened with Gaza has done exactly that, with the tunnel economy, et cetera. Now, the way I see things right now is there is this back‑and‑forth. There is not going to be a perfect security solution. Of course, not all of the Gaza policy is to do with security. My tendency is to read the Israeli management of the Gaza situation as trying to balance three things: what I guess one might call hard security—genuinely what goes in and out and what can be used—number one.
Number two is making sure that the situation is not so desperate that Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza, actually cannot control the more radical factions—and the Israelis understand that. They deal with Hamas. This may not be a direct negotiation but there is a ceasefire and when it is reached, it is reached with Hamas. If the American Secretary of State has to speak to who is then the Egyptian president to secure a ceasefire because they are both in dialogue with the respective warring parties, that is what they do.
The third thing they are trying to balance is a political intentionality right now, which is to push Gaza on to Egypt. I think the Egyptian position is to push Gaza back on to Israel. So you also now have this dynamic between Israel and Egypt as to where Gaza’s hinterland is? Is it pointed towards the West Bank and two states, or is it pointed towards Egypt? It does not seem that either side particularly want themselves to be that hinterland. The Israelis sometimes get concerned when the Egyptians are clamping down too much on what can get in and out of Gaza. The bottom line is that it is a political call. Yes, the situation in Gaza, in terms of lifting many of the provisions of the blockade, can be significantly improved without what I believe and what the people I talk to—many Israeli security professionals—consider to be undue or excessive risks to Israeli security.
Chair: Obviously Gaza is the extreme one, but there are problems on the West Bank as well in terms of the economic linkages. I am going to bring in Peter Luff.
Q39 Peter Luff: On one of the practical questions of how we actually help the Palestinians, SodaStream—Israeli investment in the occupied territory: good or bad?
Daniel Levy: You do not mean as a product.
Peter Luff: No, Scarlett Johansson tells us that. I mean as a role model for helping Palestinians into employment.
Daniel Levy: I cannot put myself in the place of a Palestinian, but I think most people would baulk at the idea that benevolent occupation is a path to Palestinian enfranchisement, fulfilment of rights and even a better life over time, because I do not think that has been the case.
All the studies show that the biggest impediment to Palestinian economic progress is not the absence of an Israeli-run SodaStream factory that can employ some tens of Palestinians or not; it is the inability to control their own resources, their own land, the 60% of territory that is Area C that they do not have access to, their own external border arrangements and crossings, who they import from and export to, and the fact that it is a captive market tied to an Israeli market with an order of magnitude of 18 times, or 15 times, greater GDP per capita than the Palestinian market.
Are there Palestinians employed in the construction of settlements, in settlement factories, in settlement agricultural lands, who take home their pay packet as a consequence of working in that settlement entity? Yes, there are. Do they and their family personally benefit? Yes. Is this a long-term strategy or even a medium-term strategy that Palestinians can rally around as a way of fulfilling their potential? I do not think anyone would make that argument.
Margot Ellis: It is also the question—there is a lot of discussion now around peace talks—about the future of the Jordan Valley. Israelis, of course, want to control it, citing security concerns. But if the Jordan Valley were ceded in some way to Israel, basically the potential economic viability of a Palestinian state is completely undermined. That would be the bread basket of a future Palestine.
Q40 Chair: If you had a genuine peace settlement and a two-state solution, it is quite possible that Israelis would invest in a factory in the Palestinian territories.
Daniel Levy: With Jordan and Egypt, you have special industrial zones with special trade arrangements with the US, where Israeli and Jordanian, or Israeli and Egyptian, business people work together. That sadly does not apply until we have a Palestinian state.
Q41 Peter Luff: So are people like Christian Aid right to call for a boycott on products from Israeli settlements?
Daniel Levy: I think it is absolutely legitimate to say that there is a distinction between the Israel that we recognise in the 1967 lines and what goes on as Israeli activity beyond those 1967 lines. When Europe signs trade agreements, it is signing them with Israel; it is not recognising the occupation as part of the entity it is signing trade agreements with. I think labelling, therefore, is absolutely legitimate. I make the case with Israelis that if you do not want Israel to be boycotted, allow consumers to distinguish and to say, “I want to buy Israeli, but I do not want to buy that.” Each individual’s choice of conscience as a consumer as to whether they buy a product or not is their choice and it is facilitated by drawing that distinction.
Q42 Peter Luff: I have a slightly different question on the impact of DFID’s money on Palestinian welfare. We have been told by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign that DFID may be inadvertently supporting the disinvestment of Palestinian life in Area C by providing healthcare and education in areas A and B to serve the population of Area C. It is quite complex, but the point is an important one. Are we actually doing harm inadvertently?
Daniel Levy: I will say one sentence and then I will shut up. I imagine if you meet with Palestinian civil society groups, you will hear this critique, which is that Israel remains the occupying power. It is a bizarre occupying power, because it is relieved of its duties as an occupying power by virtue of aid donations to the Palestinian authority. When I first lived in Israel, one of the strongest arguments for those who then advocated two states and making peace was the economic costs. Almost all of those economic costs are now shouldered by the British taxpayer and other taxpayers around the world, which takes me back to those choices. So, it is more than just the Area C thing that the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign points out. There is an entire logic here which says, “You are subsidising the occupation.” There is a very powerful counter-logic that says that we are keeping open the possibility of Israelis and Palestinians coming to terms in a less violent environment with a peaceful negotiation by maintaining some kind of stability and poverty alleviation. Those are the counterpoints in that debate.
Q43 Peter Luff: And what is your view?
Daniel Levy: My view is that as long as HMG policy and consensus here is about a negotiated two‑state outcome, what you are doing makes sense. As long as there is a degree of Palestinian and Israeli buy-in to that, that is legitimate as well. I would be a little more forward-leaning, as I said, on the Area C East Jerusalem stuff.
Q44 Chair: Just coming back to the Area C issues, you have to get a permit to develop there. They do not seem to be issued very often and they seem to be difficult. Very often, even after that, the structures are demolished. Have you had any particular impact of that on your own work? In other words, have you been denied permits or, alternatively, have you made investments that have subsequently been demolished, which would bring into question the original investment?
Margot Ellis: We are impacted in the sense that Palestine refugees are living in Area C. First of all, 60% of the land area of the West Bank is in Area C. But, unfortunately, between state lines and areas within Area C that are allocated for settlement activity or public roads, 70% of that body of land is not available for Palestinian settlement. We have 19 camps in the West Bank, and five of them are in Area C. We are affected—not so much directly UNRWA as an organisation, but because of our role in protecting Palestinian refugees—by the home demolitions. There were 663 home demolitions in the last year. We are talking about 1,100 Palestinians, about 35% of whom were displaced this last year. The lack of ability to secure permits and settlement expansion inevitably leads to further displacement of Palestinians in Area C.
Q45 Chair: Have your own buildings been removed or lost?
Margot Ellis: Not our buildings. However, if a cistern is removed and demolished that is owned or used by a Palestinian refugee, it undermines the economic livelihood of a community. One good example is the Bedouin community. With the expansion of the Ma'ale Adumim settlement, which is a very large settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem with potential further expansions, one of the groups to be further displaced is the Bedouin community—these are Bedouins who were displaced earlier from the Negev. We are working with 2,300 Bedouins who are under threat of forcible displacement, who not only would need to move, but their traditional source of livelihood—herding—would be destroyed forever. So, we work with Palestine refugees who are affected by home demolitions and potential threats to their livelihood.
Q46 Chair: That effectively means that Israel can take action that leads to economic damage, which the international community then finishes up paying compensation for, not the Israeli authorities. Is that right?
Margot Ellis: Yes.
John Ging: We recorded last year, in 2013, 122 projects funded by donors that have been demolished. Temporary shelters, support structures for livestock, and water and sanitation facilities directly funded by donors had been demolished as part of this campaign of demolishments that have taken place over the past year.
Q47 Chair: And no compensation has been paid for those.
John Ging: No, and the ICRC on their part—the Red Cross—have suspended all support in this regard. They no longer give shelter support to those who have had their homes demolished, because of the confiscation and destruction of that support. So they have stopped their programme.
Q48 Chair: Do you think the UK—DFID—should do that?
John Ging: No, I think what we have to do is find a solution where there is respect for these programmes, because they are only providing the very basic support that people need to protect them from the elements and give them basic human dignity such as water and sanitation facilities.
Q49 Mr McCann: If you look back at history—I do not claim to be an expert by any manner or means—you can see different parts where layers and layers of compromises have led to even bigger problems that we have to face today in terms of attempting to get to a two-state solution. Perhaps, Margot, we can have a look at UNRWA’s role in that, because the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees states that persons who have acquired a new nationality shall no longer be considered as refugees. Yet UNRWA’s definition of Palestinians refugees includes those who have acquired new nationalities. How can you justify that?
Margot Ellis: We are also talking about the question of descendants. We have a clear mandate that was given us by the UN General Assembly and its members. It was to provide protection and assistance to Palestine refugees. There is a specific definition of what Palestine refugees are: those who were living in British Mandate Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 who lost both their homes and livelihood. I will first address the whole question of the descendants. The reason we continue to support descendants of these originally displaced persons is because of a lack of a political solution.
We have been criticised in the Israeli press that, unlike UNHCR, we are perpetuating the problem by providing assistance to subsequent generations of Palestinians. Actually, in any protracted refugee situation, such as when the UNHCR deals with non-Palestinians, they would support subsequent generations that are displaced. I will give you a couple of examples: Afghan refugees who have been displaced for a long period in Pakistan; Burmese refugees displaced in Thailand; and Bhutanese refugees in Nepal. That inter-generational transfer of refugee status is not unique to Palestine refugees.
The second part of the question was—
Mr McCann: It was about UNRWA’s definition of Palestinian refugees including those who have acquired new nationalities.
Margot Ellis: There has never been a question of refugee status as far as the determination is concerned. For UNRWA, its provision of services is not determined by whether someone has that refugee status or not. That is what we are focused on.
Q50 Mr McCann: You say that it is a lack of a political solution that is making these issues continue, but your definition of Palestine refugees also includes those who were born and continue to reside in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Given that definition, the total number of refugees is close to 5 million. ICAI highlighted that that number continues to rise and, therefore, by counting those individuals as refugees, it becomes an even bigger problem numerically. The problem is that it makes a political solution even more difficult to accommodate. It is a classic catch-22 position where UNRWA’s existence and its definition of Palestinian refugees is creating obstacles to a political solution, is it not?
Margot Ellis: No, because if UNRWA were to go away today or tomorrow, the refugee problem would not go away.
Q51 Mr McCann: It is not UNRWA; it is the definition of refugees that is the issue, is it not?
Margot Ellis: The definition is a universal definition. Even if, as I said, UNRWA were to go away, and UNHCR were to be responsible for Palestine refugees—
Q52 Mr McCann: But, Margot, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees states that persons who acquire a new nationality shall no longer be considered as refugees. You have got a different definition.
John Ging: But what is their new nationality? Which country? Will the United Kingdom take those who are in camps in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Jordon? Will they take them in and give them a new nationality, or the United States?
Q53 Mr McCann: Your argument is that this is an established definition. It is not. I am quoting the 1951 Convention that states that you acquire a new nationality. So if a child is born in another country, they still have the ability to be a Palestinian refugee?
John Ging: If the country gives them the nationality. But the refugees—the Palestinians—living in Lebanon, for example, have absolutely no rights, no status, in Lebanon, other than their Palestinian refugee status.
Q54 Chair: Is there not another problem where, if all these people are displaced, because they were displaced, they would have the right to return to Israel in the event of a two‑state solution, in which case Israel would not be able to exist in its present state?
Daniel Levy: I can speak from the perspective of someone who was a negotiator on behalf of the Israeli Government in Taba and just prior to that, which is well over a decade ago. My experience—and I do not think this is exclusively my experience—is that this has not been the sticking point in negotiations. There is, amongst the PLO leadership, an understanding that the choice to pursue—this is not an UNRWA position; this is me simply sharing my experience—from 1988 a two‑state national rights approach impacted on and has a consequence for how one approaches the refugee issue in negotiations.
Now, do you go out to the Palestinian public and say, “We have not secured our land yet; we have not secured Jerusalem yet; we have not secured sovereignty yet. But here is the good news: we've already given up on your rights as refugees as you perceive them.” Probably no negotiator would go about doing it like that. Have they sent hints at the times when negotiations looked promising? Has that conversation, which will not be a simple conversation—I do not want to pretend that it will be—begun to bubble up and be addressed differently? The preponderance of evidence is that is has, and that you have seen a shift in that conversation. I think the longer this goes on, the longer Palestinians say, “Well, we are not going to get a sovereign real state anyway, so why concede this as well?”, the more that will assert itself among Palestinians.
Q55 Chair: The straightforward counter is: if a two‑state solution arrived, basically these people would become Palestinians living in the West Bank. They would not go back to Israel. Probably, that would be negotiated away as part of a package.
Daniel Levy: Exactly. One would find the language and provisions, but that is absolutely the bottom line.
Q56 Sir Tony Cunningham: Changing the subject, do you agree that donors should support projects to bring Palestinians into contact with their Israeli peers, and why do you think such projects have received so little support up to now?
Daniel Levy: I do not know that they have received so little support. Am I, in principle, opposed to Israelis and Palestinians coming into contact more? No.
Q57 Sir Tony Cunningham: The reason I ask is that DFID have said that their bilateral programme in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is not currently funding projects involving Israeli/Palestinian joint working.
Daniel Levy: There have been 20 years of attempts to put together what were called people-to-people programmes. In the 1994 agreement, you had a clause, and there was even a state given leadership in shepherding this—Norway—in supporting people-to-people programmes. An entire infrastructure was put into place. My concern at DFID using that funding is that I do not think those programmes have particularly proven themselves, which does not mean that there are not individual programmes—I know that some are touched on in DFID’s work—that do fantastic work. They do do fantastic work, but there is such an asymmetry in this situation.
Regarding the very interaction and who you can bring from the Palestinian side into an engagement on people-to-people programmes—whether because of security clearance or permits or language access—my fear is that we will end up bringing elites together. Does that mean we should challenge ourselves to do better programmes? I am sure that that is the case. My tendency is to think that that is better left to philanthropic foundations and other funders for those kind of projects, rather than to development assistance. Given Israel’s GDP per capita and its standing economically, is that the thing that one should be spending money on? That would be a very personal take on that issue.
Q58 Sir Tony Cunningham: Should donors such as DFID cooperate with Mashav, and how might such a cooperation work?
Daniel Levy: I would draw a distinction between cooperating with Mashav, which is the Israeli development agency, and the Israeli foreign ministry on matters related to the territories and Palestinians, which I think would be a bad idea, versus consideration of working with Mashav on global development projects. The German Government is en masse in Israel right now, and they have just signed a cooperation programme with Mashav. In that respect, I think one would look, on a case-by-case basis, at whether a particular Mashav project adds value, whether carrying the Mashav label adds value to a DFID project, and judge it on that merit.
Sir Tony Cunningham: So, it depends on the project.
Q59 Chair: Just a final question to John Ging. Were you in the room for the first panel?
John Ging: Part of it; not all of it.
Chair: On the issue of Syria and the role of OCHA in that, we obviously had a whole discussion about inaccessibility and how it is constantly changing. Is there a role for OCHA in monitoring this? Some suggested a monthly report. Is there a role for OCHA in negotiating access, whether in government areas or opposition areas? Just exactly what is OCHA doing and what do you think OCHA could do in that context?
John Ging: Valerie Amos herself is leading on this. There is a high level group of member states who are having influence over the different parties on the ground to negotiate access at the operational level. This has been something that we have been pursuing at every level, with every means and mechanism that we have, because getting access is our number one priority. There are 242,000 people besieged. You probably heard that this morning. There are 3 million people beyond our regular reach, who we know are in humanitarian need. And there are 7 million in the places where there are those 3 million who we know are in need who, again, are very vulnerable.
In terms of the overall number of people in need in Syria, which is approximately 9 million, we are not having access to those who are in most need, either at all, for those that are in besieged communities, or those who are hard to reach, which is the 3 million that I mentioned. So it is top priority. It preoccupies the leadership of OCHA on a daily basis to try to negotiate. Valerie Amos herself updates the Security Council on the detail of what we are doing, what we are not able to do, what we should be able to do, what we are trying to do, where the breakdown is and so forth.
As you recall, on 2 October, we got a presidential statement from the Security Council unanimously directing that the parties to this conflict respect international humanitarian law, starting with free and unimpeded access. That did not translate into the result that we needed on the ground over the last couple of months. That is why, this past Saturday, the Security Council, again, unanimously adopted, this time, a resolution on access. We are now hoping that that will influence the parties.
It comes down to using all the routes. The whole question of crossing international borders has been very controversial. But in this resolution, that has now been spelt out as also a route that has to be opened up. Because, again, just trying to cross conflict lines, which are the places where it is most dangerous and difficult, is just not feasible, operationally or practically speaking. Our number one preoccupation in coordination is to support our sister humanitarian agencies to get the access to the people and to use all the mechanisms.
Q60 Chair: Does that mean you either publish it or it is accessible information on an ongoing basis?
John Ging: Absolutely, and the updates to the Security Council are also made public.
Q61 Chair: Just a final point on the consequence of that resolution: do you see that opening up any more negotiating or opportunities? Russia and China are now on board. Is that likely to lead to—
John Ging: Yes, it is a clear step-change. We have had three years of conflict. It is only since October that we have had consensus in the Council by those who have major influence over the parties on the ground. Now there is a consensus, what we find is that all member states who have influence on all sides are actually genuinely using that influence to try to move the parties to do what they are obliged to do under international law. Unfortunately, until now, the parties on the ground have not responded in accordance with their responsibility and obligations. That is why they have stepped it up from a presidential statement to a resolution, and the Secretary General has been asked to report back in 30 days on progress, because this is life and death. 5,000 people are being killed every month in Syria. The level of humanitarian suffering is absolutely appalling and quite unprecedented. Again, this is a shame on us all that we are not able to help these impoverished people in their time of need.
Chair: We share your sense of shame and frustration. I obviously appreciate that you are very much in the middle of it. You have been in the middle of it for an awful long time and your reports out of Gaza at the worst times were very much appreciated. They were very forthright and very helpful. Also, can I say that you will appreciate that the Committee, first of all, is embarking on this inquiry? You can tell there are differences of view in terms of background within the Committee, but it is really, really helpful for us to get informed opinion along the lines you have given to us. I certainly have found it really valuable. I hope our Committee will be able to find a useful contribution. We may not be able to agree on everything, but I hope we can find things on the basis of the evidence and information we have that add constructively. At the end of the day, for us, it is about how we can help the UK Government to do whatever it is doing most effectively in terms of its contribution to make the international community work together well. Your evidence is extremely helpful and very valuable to us. We very much appreciate it.
John Ging: Thank you very much.
Oral evidence: The UK’s Development Work in The Middle East, HC 948 2