EU Referendum

Showing posts with label Palestine. Show all posts

Fayyad_Solana[i-Fayyad_Solana]Russia is not the only country and the Caucasus is not the only region the EU finds hard to deal with and where, if truth be told, it makes a bad situation even worse. I think it is fair to say that everything the EU has done in the Middle East has helped to deepen the problems there.

Not least, we have the problem of aid to various Palestinian groups. The argument is always the same: we do not approve of terrorism or deliberate attacks on civilian population whether it is Israeli or Palestinian of the wrong kind and we would much rather Hamas, Fatah and whoever else acknowledged Israel's right to exist though if they don’t we understand; and, of course, we would much rather the Palestinians did not waste the money they get in aid on hate-filled school text books or on equipment for terrorists or simply on feathering the leaders' nests; but if we do not give them aid they will produce pictures of hungry children and empty shops and their friends in the NGOs will talk endlessly about humanitarian catastrophes. So, more lucre filched from the taxpayer is sent to completely corrupt and politically impossible Palestinian organizations.

It seems that the Palestinian Authority a.k.a. Al-Fatah is once again struggling to meet the government pay-roll's demands, which, given how many people are on that list, is a serious matter. If they don't get paid they will start using their ammunition and you don’t want that.

Added to which, it would appear, that Arab solidarity does not go very far and the EU had to step in (had to? Who says?) and add another €40 million over and above the €256 million already "disbursed" this year. Handed over to the Palestinian Authority is a better way of describing it than disbursed but let that pass.

The 40 million euro injection of funds comes on top of the 256 million euros in budget support disbursed so far this year by the European Union.

[Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad has struggled in recent months to pay government workers because many Arab donors have not met their financial commitments. "The situation is very, very tight, for sure," a top official from Fayyad's office said this week.

A Palestinian official said the EU money would help Fayyad meet the next government payroll, due in the first week of September. Fayyad has been waiting for months to receive $80 million pledged by Kuwait but it is unclear when the funds will arrive in the Palestinian Authority's coffers, officials say.

It has always been our contention on this blog that if we really do want to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority or the Hamas government in Gaza, we should stop all aid until all conditions, and that includes an open and transparent budget system, were met. Their Arab brethren would not step in. Of course, the Palestinians deprived of their subsidy might decide to put their economy in order instead of wasting money on rockets to fire into Israel and that would be all to the good.

Barghouti[i-Barghouti]That is how Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian Information Minister and not a member of either Hamas or Fatah, describes the recently formed "unity" government of Palestine in an interview with Der Spiegel.

The reason is quite simple: it represents 96 per cent of the Palestinian people. Without going too deeply into the arithmetic, I should like to point out that Stalin usually managed to get 99.5 per cent of the popular vote, so the Palestinian government has some way to go.

Furthermore, the last election Saddam Hussein held in Iraq actually gave him 100 per cent of the popular vote plus one. The reason, I was told by an Iraqi who lives in the United States is that Ben Bella, former Communist-leaning dictator of Algeria and a Hero of the Soviet Union, was visiting the country at the time and was asked to cast a vote for Saddam as well.

The problem is that the "unity" government was dragged together in Riyadh a couple of weeks ago after a good deal of fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Nor has that completely died down. So, in actual fact, there is some difficulty in getting people to accept that they are being represented.

Furthermore, there is the problem of an opposition. There isn't one and that is a bit of a handicap where democracy is concerned. If everybody is inside the tent, because that is the only way you can keep them from killing each other (mostly) and because that is the only way they will be able to give some dosh to their followers, then there is nobody to oppose the policies (when they finally make their way to the surface, if they ever do) peacefully.

The reason for the interview is that Chancellor Merkel is off on her travels again tomorrow. Even Blair has been known to stay in Britain for a while. What's with the lady?

This time she is going to the Middle East, to represent the EU in another attempt to sort out the mess, presumably by putting pressure on Israel to accept the somewhat unsatisfactory Saudi solution, which is, at the moment, the Arab consensus, imposed on the warring factions by the Sauds.

Mr Barghouti is hoping for good things from the visit, from the European Union and from Germany in particular as it has been "a supporter of the Palestinian people" for a long time. Sadly, it has not been able to ensure that the Palestinian people acquire some reasonable politicians. Nobody can do that.

Mr Barghouti has a point when he insists that other countries cannot pick and choose which ministers they negotiate with but, of course, that is not the real grievance. It is the absence (well, not exactly absence, but some diminishing) of aid money that the Palestinian ministers keep complaining about. While one acknowledges that the government was the choice of the Palestinian people, there is no particular reason why we should subsidize it or the various militias that are roaming the place.

The interviewer, to be fair, asks Mr Barghouti several times whether his government is prepared to recognize Israel's right to existence, getting no straight response, merely a good deal of complaining about putting the Palestinians under too much pressure.

Chancellor Merkel can save herself a trip, surely a good thing to do from the global warming perspective. Nothing much will come of it. Germany should not start putting pressure on the one truly democratic country in the Middle East.

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Haniya,+Johansen[i-Haniya,+Johansen]It is, of course, almost a given in European diplomatic and political circles that foreign policy in Europe is more nuanced and more subtle than it is in the United States of America (with Australia being thrown in ever more frequently as the closest ally).

In practice, that means support for some of the worst tyrannies and terrorists of all description at the expense of potential democratic allies. Once again, we are witnessing European politicians lining up to be nice to the Hamas-led "unity" government, regardless of its refusal even to pretend to abide by the international conditions.

Lining up to do what, incidentally? Well, to hand over large chunks of taxpayers' money without bothering to find out what it is being used for. A long piece on the subject here.

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Salam+Fayyad[i-Salam+Fayyad]According to the Sunday Telegraph the EU alone sent £59.5 million to the Hamas-led (if that is the right expression) Palestinian government in aid, despite the fact that Hamas has not fulfilled any of the conditions, supposedly imposed on it by the international authority.

On top of that, an unknown and “a far greater sum directly to hospitals, power generation projects and to families in need”. No proper auditing or accounting of these sums have been done but then there is nothing new in that. There has never been any proper auditing or accounting of moneys given to the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinians in general.

An estimated £362.5 million has flowed into Palestinian government coffers from abroad since the election that brought Hamas to power and ushered in a period of internal conflict that came close to all-out civil war.

That, of course, excludes the amounts going through NGOs to “hospitals, power generation projects, families in need” and whatever else Jimmy Carter may have thought of as a suitable recipient of funds.

Where is all this money? Alas, as before, there is no accounting for it.

Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank Official, former IMF representative in the Palestine and former Finance Minister under the late unlamented Chairman Yasser Arafat, says that nobody knows what happened to the money.

Mr Fayyad, a member of the Legislative Council, from the Third Way Party (they have two members, the other one being Hanan Ashrawi) is about to become the Finance Minister again. He had been touted as a possible Prime Minister but one of his conditions for accepting the post was that Hamas should recognize Israel’s right to exist. Unlike the international community, he seems to have kept his word and not accepted the job without his main condition being fulfilled.

According to the Telegraph

Now, Palestinian Authority spending is out of control, salaries are being paid to workers who never turn up, and nobody can track where the money is going, according to Mr Fayyad.

There was no way to be certain that aid was being used as intended, he admitted. "Please write this: no one can give donors that assurance. Why? Because the system is in a state of total disrepair."

What the Telegraph journalist does not ask is why precisely Mr Fayyad should be so surprised. He was, after all, Finance Minister five years ago, when the situation was not much better. Millions of pounds, dollars and euros that had been sent in aid to the Palestinian Authority disappeared, some to surface as payment to such delightful organizations as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade and to families of unsuccessful suicide/homicide bombers, some not to surface at all.

Mr Fayyad, having apparently set up some sort of a budgeting system five years ago, having seen it disintegrate and having realized the magnitude of the problem now has various plans:

He said his first objective would be to make the finance ministry the sole conduit for incoming aid, and to reinstate proper audits. That meant no more financial back channels or border smuggling, he said. "It's not my intention to manage the Palestinian budget system through the brown bag." The Palestinian Authority's unchecked proliferation of government jobs - growing by 11 per cent a year - is another threat to its existence, the World Bank said. Mr Fayyad acknowledged that the problem of thousands of absentee employees was "serious", but said it would take up to five years to bring wages into line with income.

Some of us might point out that unbridled aid is not “income”. Would this experienced financial manager be able to come up with a budget that was slightly different? After all, we have our own budget (several of them) already and one sees no reason why there should be a Palestinian one as well that dissipates our tax money.

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