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January 15, 2010

Antonia Zerbisias

Is Canada pulling the plug on the UN's Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides education, health and other social services in 59 Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East?

Will UNRWA's Canadian funding be diverted instead to training Palestinian police forces and building courthouses and prisons?

That's certainly what was suggested on Wednesday by Treasury Minister Vic Toews in both the Jerusalem Post and a news release from B'nai Brith Canada. Toews, who met on Monday with senior Palestinian Authority (PA) officials in the occupied West Bank, is quoted by the Post saying, "Canada is not reducing the amount of money given to the PA, but it is now being redirected in accordance with Canadian values."

Yesterday, the Canada-Israel Committee also released a statement applauding the government's reallocation of UNRWA's funding to ``direct food aid to the Palestinians."

In the wake of the government's defunding of the humanitarian and activist KAIROS last month which, as Immigration Minister Jason Kenney indicated to a Jerusalem audience, is an anti-Semitic organization, Canada's refusal to fund UNRWA, should that be the case, would come as no surprise.

UNRWA is controversial because, as its critics note, its mandate supports the Palestinian right of return. It also has been accused of hiring terrorists. That despite a report last year by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) that said the organization has "strengthened'' its operations to avoid providing support to UN-recognized terrorist groups.

"Canadian funding of UNRWA has always been problematic due to the fact that numerous reports spelled out the degree to which Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations have infiltrated UNRWA,'' Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith Canada, said in a statement on Wednesday. "We are grateful that Canadians have a government that truly understands the situation in Israel and the territories and has acted to redirect funding from UNRWA to specific projects in the Palestinian Authority.''

While saying he finds the reports in the Post and in other media confusing on the funding issue, UNRWA's New York City-based Andrew Whitley, who is responsible for the organization's relations with Ottawa, flatly denies any terrorist associations.

"We know that there is a vocal pro-Israel lobby in Canada,'' he told me in a telephone interview. "I have met a number of the groups, especially the Canada- Israel Committee, on several occasions and so have the commissioner general and deputy commissioner general of the organization. They have chosen to continue to criticize us unfairly and often quite erroneously making quite false statements – guilt by association – which is not correct."

Like KAIROS, UNRWA receives funding via the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which is overseen by Bev Oda, the minister of international cooperation.

Note that the justice funding and UNRWA contributions come from different budgets. But, despite repeated attempts to get clarification from both Toews' and Oda's offices, the exact state of UNRWA's future Canadian contributions remains vague.

That said, Toews' communications director, Christine Csversko, said in an email yesterday that Canada is honouring its five-year, $300 million commitment to Palestinians, a pledge made in late 2007, to "support security, justice sector reform, private sector development and humanitarian assistance."

In 2009, said Whitley, Canada gave UNRWA $20 million, 3.7 per cent of the funding it receives from governments. It's too early to tell how much, if any, of an allocation will be made for 2010, he added. The amount Canada contributes varies from year to year, depending on emergencies and UNRWA infrastructure projects.

Toews' statement in the Jerusalem Post that Canada has "pledged $20M towards training prosecutors, judges and police and building up the Palestinian judicial sector'' is in keeping with what Canada has been doing elsewhere, notably in Haiti. There, Canada has been building prisons and training police forces as opposed to the usual forms of humanitarian aid.

But, considering the warring Palestinian factions in Gaza and the West Bank, one has to wonder if Canada has taken sides in the internal conflicts – and will help the PA jail its political enemies.

Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar.ca.

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