UNRWA Response to allegations made by
the Centre Simon Wiesenthal in its statement
to the Commission on 31 March 2003

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA or the Agency) would like to put on the record of these proceedings a formal response to the statement read on 31 March 2003 by Dr. Shimon Samuels, acting as the permanent representative of the Centre Simon Wiesenthal – Europe. Dr. Samuels’ statement constitutes a baseless attack on UNRWA and on its Commissioner-General, Mr. Peter Hansen, that is particularly disappointing coming from an organization that has otherwise established a reputation and is generally respected by the international community.

UNRWA was created by the General Assembly in 1949 with a mandate under which the Agency has provided since then shelter, water, basic food, sanitation services, primary health care and other relief and social services to refugees (and their descendents) from the original 1948 conflict and to persons in need following the 1967 conflict and later hostilities. This mandate has been extended regularly, usually every three years, by the General Assembly, which each time has applauded UNRWA’s work. The Agency’s operations have also been strongly supported over the years by the international donor community.

After the June 1967 war, the Government of Israel expressly requested UNRWA to “continue its assistance to the Palestine refugees, with the full cooperation of the Israel authorities, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas”. Israel entered into a binding written agreement with UNRWA under which Israel agreed to “facilitate the task of UNRWA to the best of its ability”. The Government of Israel, in commenting at the end of last year on the Agency’s Annual Report for the year ended 30 June 2002, wrote to the General Assembly:

Israel appreciates and supports the important humanitarian work carried out by UNRWA and continues to facilitate, to the best of its ability, the carrying out of the mandate of the Agency. The Government of the State of Israel welcomes the humanitarian assistance granted by UNRWA to the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip . . ..

To answer the specific accusations against UNRWA in Dr. Samuels’ statement, confusing and unspecific as they are, may be giving them more credit than they deserve. In order that the record be clear, however, UNRWA notes the following:

• “discouraging self-development” – UNRWA’s programme of basic primary and preparatory education for half a million refugee children, as well as specialised vocational training and, in Lebanon, where the Palestine refugee population is particularly disadvantaged, some secondary education facilities, as well as UNRWA’s Microfinance and Microenterprise Programme are at the heart of not just encouraging, but actively enabling, generation after generation of Palestine refugees to have the basic tools needed for self-development and self-sufficiency. Largely as a result of UNRWA’s efforts, before the beginning of the crisis that has developed since September 2000, some 95% of the then 3.8 million registered Palestine refugees were self-supporting.

• “preventing international – including Israeli – efforts during the Oslo process, to provide the infrastructure for normalization” – It is not at all clear what “the infrastructure of normalization” might mean, but the Agency’s extensive efforts at providing both the material and social underpinnings for normalization of life in the occupied Palestinian territory have been amply detailed in the Agency’s annual reports to the General Assembly, including during the entire Oslo process. UNRWA includes in its education programmes special initiatives promoting tolerance and peaceful resolution of conflicts. The Agency certainly is not “preventing” any activities of either the international community, with which UNRWA works closely, or the Government of Israel.

• “serving the policies of Arab neighbours opposed to integration of the refugees in order to stoke the ever festering conflict . . . discouraging resettlement” – While UNRWA has not engaged in the political debate that has swirled around the issue of the refugees’ right of return (the subject of successive UN resolutions), it has taken up with neighbouring Arab countries the cause of Palestine refugees within the borders of those countries in an effort to obtain for the refugees access to education, health care and employment.

• “providing sinecures and patronage to a corrupt administration” -- This accusation denigrates the fine work and enormous contributions of thousands of UNRWA staff members, many of whom work for minimal salaries, in carrying out the Agency’s extensive humanitarian operations. If the reference to “a corrupt administration” is meant to suggest that there is outside pressure that determines UNRWA hiring practices, this is simply not true.

• Failure to speak out against Palestinian violence – UNRWA has spoken out repeatedly against unwarranted violence perpetrated by both sides to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. To cite just one example, in an interview which UNRWA’s Commissioner-General gave to the London-based Al-Hayat in April 2002 (and that has since been carried on the Agency’s website), the following exchange took place:

Q: “What does it mean to remove the photos of martyrs and prevent students from placing their martyr colleagues on the school desks?”

A: We can not be a base for promoting the idea of suicide bombers and we [are] totally against what they do. This was also affirmed by the Secretary General. We aim to concentrate on the educational process that require[s] pushing forward the peace process between the parties.

• “funds granted to UNRWA go to replace other Palestine Authority budgets” –UNRWA has no control, of course, over the Palestinian Authority or its use of its funds, and there is no reason whatsoever for UNRWA, or the international community for that matter, to abandon the suffering Palestinians simply because there are allegations of abuses on the part of the Palestinian Authority. Similarly, UNRWA does not halt its aid because of criticism that its efforts directly relieve pressure on the state budget of Israel (which, as the occupying power, is obligated under international law to provide food and medical supplies to the population under occupation and to support the care and education of children).

In addition to the attacks on UNRWA, the Wiesenthal Center has accused the Commissioner-General personally of making statements that compromise UNRWA’s mandate and that violate the standards of conduct appropriate for United Nations officials. The Center then jumbles together out of context snippets from various statements and interviews given by the Commissioner-General and implies that all of them were made about the Israeli destruction of parts of the Jenin refugee camp in early April 2002.Hereunder, each allegation is taken in turn and refuted, based inter alia on photographic evidence obtained at the time.

• “a human catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history” – The Commissioner-General made this statement in an UNRWA Press Release dated 18 April 2002 after leading a UN delegation into the Jenin refugee camp as soon as humanitarian workers were allowed in after the fighting died down. The full press release is available on UNRWA’s website. The attached photographs (3 and 4) taken that day that show what prompted his remarks.

• “helicopters strafing civilian residential areas” – This quotation is from an UNRWA Press Release of 7 April 2002 That IDF helicopters have strafed Palestinian residential areas in the West Bank during March and April 2002, particularly in the Jenin refugee camp is now widely accepted as fact. The Report of the Secretary-General prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution ES-10/10 dated 30 July 2002 says about the attack on the Jenin camp in April:

Interviews with witnesses conducted by human rights organizations suggest that tanks, helicopters and ground troops using small arms predominated in the first two days, after which armoured bulldozers were used to demolish houses and other structures so as to widen alleys in the camp.

There are reports that during this period [between 5 and 9 April] IDF increased missile strikes from helicopters and the use of bulldozers — including their use to demolish homes and allegedly bury beneath them those who refused to surrender — and engaged in “indiscriminate” firing.

• “bodies piling up” – An UNRWA Press Release on 2 April 2002 referring to the military assaults on Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm and Qalqilya, quotes the Commissioner-General as having said: “Bodies are piling up in hospitals and medicines are in short supply.” An UNRWA Press Release of 7 April 2002 reported: “Bodies are piling up in the corridors of Jenin hospital, where 30 people are reported to have died in the last 36 hours, the operating theatre there has run out of oxygen and medicines are about to run out.” All these assertions were documented by aid workers operating in Jenin at the t ime and were corroborated by UNRWA international staff in the area.

• “mass graves” – The Commissioner-General gave an interview by teleconference to a group of journalists in Geneva on 5 April 2002. According to UNRWA’s transcript, in answer to a question about the difficulty of burying dead people in the camps and elsewhere, he said, “Yes I think it is particularly appalling that religious observance in connection with death and burial have been so grossly violated. And I do appeal to everybody to respect the basic religious (inaudible), something that the Israeli population of Judaic tradition can understand very well. I hope that it can be respected, but the incidences of mass graves, of people dying in houses, bleeding to death, and then being impossible to remove them. I spoke to a family in a camp recently where they had to make the burial in their own little courtyard with their shelter.” During this same period, UNRWA had received reports that Palestinians had been forced to resort to digging mass graves because hospital mortuaries had filled to overflowing.

• “a massacre . . . .Having seen the reality with my own eyes, I cannot call what happened there by any other name” – These words seem to have been taken from reports in the Danish press, quoting remarks that the Commissioner-General purportedly made on 18 April 2002 after touring Jenin. The exact quotation that appeared in Politiken for that day reads (in translation): “This is pure hell. It is no exaggeration to call it a massacre. I have previously refrained from using the word massacre, but now, when I have seen it, I cannot call it otherwise.”

The Center purports to refute all of the Commissioner-General’s statements by erroneously stating that the United Nations investigation published on 1 August 2002 “ruled that there had never been a massacre’’ in Jenin. As noted above, several of the Commissioner-General’s statements were directed to more than just Jenin, and to more than just the question of how many Palestinians had been killed there. In any event, debating whether or not to use the word “massacre” (whose dictionary meaning is “general slaughter” or “carnage”) to describe the dreadful events that took place in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 seems trivial in the face of the killing and destruction that incontrovertibly occurred there. The UN investigation referred to above did not use the word “massacre” (although a number of eyewitness statements appended to the report do use it). What the Secretary-General did conclude was the following:

By the time of the IDF withdrawal and the lifting of the curfew on 18 April, at least 52 Palestinians, of whom up to half may have been civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers were dead. Many more were injured. Approximately 150 buildings had been destroyed and many others were rendered structurally unsound. Four hundred and fifty families were rendered homeless. The cost of the destruction of property is estimated at approximately $27 million.

The report also documents that, more generally, some 497 Palestinians were killed and 1,447 wounded in the course of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) reoccupation of Palestinian areas from 1 March through 7 May 2002.

In closing, UNRWA notes that the Wiesenthal Center’s attack on the Agency and its humanitarian operations hardly seems germane to the question of the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine, which was the agenda item that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was discussing at the time. The protection of human rights in the current conflict is an issue of grave importance, . UNRWA’s mandate focuses on the implementation of the right to education and the right to health, which are essential social rights. Providing humanitarian relief in the occupied Palestinian territories also constitutes a crucial contribution to maintaining the dignity of woman and man. At the same time, respect for human rights, such as the right to life and freedom of movement, is absolutely essential to the implementation of UNRWA’s mandate. UNRWA will to continue to make a major contribution to to the preservation, under extremely difficult conditions, of basic human rights in the area.