Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Matthew Levitt

In the wake of the Gaza war, finding ways to provide much needed humanitarian support to the residents of Gaza—without inadvertently empowering Hamas—is of paramount concern. Unfortunately, problems remain with two of the primary vehicles the U.S. government intends to use to provide newly pledged aid, namely the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Today, the U.S. government announced that President Barack Obama has authorized the use of $20.3 million from the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) Fund “to address critical post-conflict humanitarian needs in Gaza.” According to the State Department press release, of the $20.3 million in new ERMA funds, $13.5 million will go to UNRWA, $6 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and $800,000 to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Beyond the contributions to UNRWA, ICRC and OCHA, State’s press release noted, USAID “has provided more than $3.7 million for emergency assistance to Gaza.”

These may in fact represent the most appropriate of the available options to get humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, but in the cases of both UNRWA and USAID recent history highlights areas of particular concern.

UNRWA. The State Department noted that today’s new contribution to UNRWA augments the $85 million the United States contributed in December 2008 toward UNRWA’s 2009 appeals. UNRWA, State noted, “is the largest provider of humanitarian aid in Gaza, providing 70 percent of the population with emergency food assistance, essential healthcare, and primary education. We are working to develop a longer-term reconstruction/development effort with international partners.”

While State hopes to use UNRWA as part of the post-Gaza war solution, a new study by James G. Lindsay, an Aufzien Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the former legal advisor and general counsel to UNRWA, details how the agency remains a big part of the problem. A twenty-year veteran of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, Lindsay spent seven years with UNRWA and nine with the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) in Sinai. He is uniquely qualified to comment on UNRWA from the inside.

Fixing UNRWA: Repairing the UN’s Troubled System of Aid to Palestinian Refugees is a must-read and covers a broad range of issues. Of immediate concern, however, especially to those striving to find a way to address the acute humanitarian needs of Gazans without strengthening or inadvertently funding Hamas, is the question of UNRWA’s patent failure to live up to its legal responsibilities under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to “take all possible measures” to prevent U.S. contributions from going to “furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army or any other guerilla type organization or who has engaged in any act of terrorism.”

The most immediate concern, related to today’s pledge and Hamas’s continued control of Gaza, is the fact that UNRWA does not sufficiently vet its employees in the West Bank and Gaza (in contrast to UNRWA staffing in Jordan and Syria, where both countries employ vetting processes for prospective area staff members applying to work within their borders). The problems are many, including this one, as noted by Lindsay:

UNRWA’s 29,000 area staff members are overwhelmingly composed of agency registered Palestinian refugees—an oft-criticized arrangement. There are several obvious downsides to UNRWA using staff members drawn from the beneficiary population. At worst, such staff may be more concerned about beneficiaries’ objectives than UNRWA’s. They can also be manipulated more easily than staff who are not beneficiaries, whether by argument or threat, to distort the agency’s objectives.

These are not hypothetical concerns. Back in October 2004, then-Commissioner-General of UNRWA Peter Hansen unapologetically admitted to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that the UN employs members of Hamas. “Oh, I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll,” Hansen stated, “and I don’t see that as a crime.” According to Hansen, “Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant, and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another.” In his comments to CBC, Hansen also insisted that UNWRA staff members, “whatever their political persuasion,” are required to “behave in accordance with UN standards and norms for neutrality.”

But as I wrote at the time, this does not always appears to be the case:

Building on Peter Hansen’s statement that the behavior of all UNRWA employees must conform with “UN standards and norms for neutrality,” the United States should work with the UN to develop, apply, and monitor a set of professional standards to ensure that UN offices, equipment, and personnel are not exploited for terrorist purposes. A logical starting point would be to ask employees to sign an antiterror pledge such as the “Certificate Regarding Terrorist Financing” already required by all recipients of U.S. Agency for International Development funding. As a member of the Quartet, the UN has a special obligation to uphold the commitment outlined in the Roadmap to dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure. In an effort to insulate good works from terrorist infiltration and exploitation, Washington should stand ready to help the UN live up to this obligation by funding an “Office of Professional Standards” for the UNRWA and similar agencies.

USAID. According to the USAID website, the agency “plays a vital role in promoting U.S. national security, foreign policy, and the War on Terrorism.” Toward these goals—and considering that several agency-approved aid recipients have been linked to terrorist groups in recent years—USAID’s proposed partner-vetting system (PVS) was a welcome and overdue development. Unfortunately, it remains unimplemented.

An aid organization by nature and design, USAID is focused more on dispersing aid than on vetting the partner and sub-partner organizations through which that aid is distributed on the ground. As a result, its otherwise laudable record is tainted by a series of awards to entities with established ties to terrorist groups, including Hamas-controlled zakat (charity) committees and the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).

For example, documents made public in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation and several of its leaders—ultimately convicted on all counts related to their providing material support for Hamas—reveal that as recently as December 2002, USAID “cleared” several charity committees to receive funding despite information publicly tying them to Hamas. These included the main committees in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Qalqilya, Hebron, Tulkarem, and Nablus, as well as the al-Tadhoman committee, also in Nablus. But a year earlier, in a November 2001 memorandum sent to the Treasury Department, the FBI had cited detailed information documenting Hamas links among the first five of these committees. Documents seized from Palestinian offices by Israeli forces in March 2002 and made public shortly thereafter revealed further links.

In March 2007, then-USAID administrator Randall Tobias was called before Congress to explain why the agency had provided more than $140,000 to the Hamas-controlled Islamic University of Gaza. In response, he described the “very thorough vetting process that takes place.” But despite State Department assertions that the USAID vetting process is thorough, several deficiencies explain how funding mistakes still occur.

In its most significant shortcoming, USAID often ran trace requests on individuals and organizations without sufficient identifier information such as date and place of birth (DPOB) or government-issued identification numbers. According to a 2006 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, “until June 2006, the [Tel Aviv] mission did not routinely collect detailed identifying information on individuals, such as [DPOB], or verify that information.” At the embassy in Tel Aviv, several interoffice memoranda documenting trace requests concluded that “no derogatory information was uncovered” despite acknowledging—in bold font—that “these trace requests are less than comprehensive.” The memoranda (made public in the Holy Land case) added that “without additional information on individuals (DPOB, ID number, full name) our reviews will be less than complete.” Despite this disclaimer, the individuals and organizations in question were approved to receive USAID awards.

A random probability sampling conducted by GAO revealed that 94 percent of all memoranda “characterized the vetting based on only the four-part name as less than comprehensive.” USAID did not even establish procedures to verify the accuracy of individual’s names, such as requiring some official identification document.

Moreover, in March 2006, the USAID mission in Tel Aviv eliminated a requirement to periodically reevaluate aid recipients after initial clearance. Terrorist associations often develop gradually, however, and this procedural change made it impossible for USAID to identify late-emerging links on its own. According to the 2006 GAO report, officials in the Tel Aviv mission claimed that “new information in 2005 showed possible links to terrorists, including Hamas, for six organizations that previously had been cleared.” Indeed, it should come as no surprise that terrorist elements might deliberately seek to penetrate previously cleared organizations.

In addition, USAID’s dollar-threshold policy leaves some recipients subject to no vetting at all. From 2001 to 2003, the threshold was $25,000—grantees awarded anything less than that sum were not vetted. In July 2003, the Tel Aviv mission raised the threshold to $100,000, in part because it feared that vetting requirements hampered its ability to deliver urgently needed humanitarian aid. As a result, according to the GAO report, no vetting was conducted on foreign organizations and individuals tied to thirty-four contracts totaling some $2.1 million between August 2003 and February 2006. The threshold was changed back to $25,000 in March 2006.

The GAO report also revealed that foreign service nationals—local, non-American embassy employees—had access to unsecured vetting data and, in at least one case, developed the database for recording and tracking vetting results. The database had several flaws, including important fields left blank or filled with inappropriate information.

As I wrote in August 2007, the proposed partner-vetting system is necessary to remedy flaws such as those found in Tel Aviv. It would require applicants for USAID funding to submit identifying information on principal officers and other employees. As recent failures make clear, effective screening is impossible without sufficient identifier information. But even with sufficient information, meaningful traces must be run not only against the full range of publicly available information—clearly not done with the IUG and Hamas charity committees—but also against classified intelligence and law enforcement databases. Improved information sharing between USAID and security agencies will be critical for this to succeed. U.S. law, including Executive Order 13224 and existing statutory requirements for USAID vetting, demands the implementation of a reliable system.

Aid organizations may protest the extra administrative burden, but the critical need to provide humanitarian aid in conflict zones must be balanced with the inherent risk that terrorist groups will try to benefit from that aid. A truly robust system of vetting USAID partners is vital to promoting U.S. foreign policy and facilitating continued U.S. aid in places such as the West Bank and Gaza. The proposed PVS deserves public and private sector support and should be fully implemented as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, while USAID first published the proposed rule for the PVS in July 2007, and a final rule was just published in the Federal Register on January 2, 2009, the proposed vetting system is still being vigorously opposed within USAID and other parts of the U.S. interagency. President Obama, however, will have the opportunity to rectify USAID’s vetting shortcomings. As the final notice in the Federal Register notes, “The decision as to whether to implement PVS will be made by the incoming Obama Administration.” The final rule is scheduled to go into effect February 2, 2009.

Both UNRWA and USAID do important work, and in the current environment are especially important players. That they both need significant improvement should be reason for increased focus and attention, not despair. There is no better place to start than with the implementation of the new USAID Partner Vetting System and the many detailed policy prescriptions offered in James Lindsay’s excellent study on UNRWA.