Opening Address by Filippo Grandi, UNRWA Deputy Commissioner-General UNRWA Special Event United Nations HQ, New York, 3 December 2007

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming here today to talk about UNRWA and its work with Palestine refugees.

Despite being one of the oldest and largest agencies of the UN, UNRWA is not the best known, in spite of having been a key actor in a region on which spotlights have been focused for almost sixty years. It is useful, I think, to open this morning’s event by reminding ourselves that UNRWA serves a population of refugees whose plight represents one of the main unresolved problems in one of the world’s most intractable and long standing conflicts. We meet today in the wake of the international community’s latest attempt to once again tackle these very issues in Annapolis, in a context in which fresh expectations mingle with the renewed, stark realization that the path to peace will be fraught with difficulties.

UNRWA was established by the General Assembly in 1949 and began operations in May the following year, providing urgently needed assistance to over 7-800,000 people who had fled their homes in the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine. This population has now grown to almost 4.5 million Palestine refugees and UNRWA’s role and responsibility have grown proportionally.

One important message that we would like to convey to you this morning is that UNRWA is not only a humanitarian organization, but also the main provider of essential public services to these 4.5 million people. We maintain operations in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza and we rely on the skills of some 28,000 staff, the majority of whom are Palestine refugees themselves. We run programmes in the areas of education and health care, relief and social services, microfinance and the improvement of infrastructure.

UNRWA’s schools serve approximately five hundred thousand refugee children. We have pioneered courses to promote human rights, tolerance and peaceful conflict resolution and we also offer vocational training programmes. Our health programme delivers comprehensive primary health care and other services. We have eradicated communicable diseases while achieving nearly a 100% record in childhood vaccinations. UNRWA’s relief services cater for refugees hardest hit by poverty, including widows, the elderly and the handicapped. We build and repair homes and provide environmental health services in 58 refugee camps. Our microfinance programme gives financial assistance as well as training to refugees and others who run small enterprises. And in emergency situations, often precipitated by armed conflict, we give refugees temporary employment, cash assistance and food.

In other words, without UNRWA, hundreds of thousands of refugee children and youth in a most volatile area of the world would become adults in a very different way – without proper education, reliable health services, and those opportunities which the Agency is able to provide in a context where employment possibilities in certain situations remain very limited – if they exist at all – for young refugees.

Conflict and violence compound the social and economic difficulties of refugees. This has happened many times in the past six decades, and is happening now, as we speak, with renewed gravity. We have chosen two examples to illustrate this situation. John Ging, Director of UNRWA Operations in Gaza, will speak about the dramatic impact of conflict on refugees in the Gaza Strip. Recent events there, and also in the West Bank, remind us that in the occupied Palestinian territory we operate in an unpredictable and unstable environment, in which, by contrast, we are expected to provide predictable and stable services. We are expected to pay thousands of teachers, health care workers and sanitation foremen at a time when banks have run out of cash. We are expected to provide a safe and secure learning environment to several hundred thousand children surrounded by armed conflict. We are expected to deliver humanitarian aid to places where closed borders and many types of internal barriers get in the way of free movement for United Nations staff.

In Lebanon, where in the past couple of years UNRWA has been discussing with the Government – in a very constructive manner – how to improve conditions in refugee camps and the lives of refugees, the Agency has had to address difficult emergency situations during the war in July 2006, and more recently in the area near Tripoli, where military action to dislodge an unwanted and infiltrated terrorist group from a refugee camp has caused the sudden displacement of thousands of refugees and Lebanese citizens. Richard Cook, Director of UNRWA Affairs in Lebanon, will speak about the challenges that we are facing in helping rebuild the lives of 30,000 refugees whose homes, today, do not exist any longer.

UNRWA thus carries a heavy burden, although – dealing, as we do, with the much more dramatic plight of the refugees – it is a burden that our staff carries every day with persistence and effectiveness. Unfortunately, however, the challenges do not end there. One of the biggest threats to UNRWA’s operations is financial. UNRWA is funded almost exclusively by voluntary contributions from member states. While our donors have by and large kept faith with us over the years, chronic funding shortfalls have become a matter of serious concern. This year, we are grappling with a budget deficit for our core programmes of some 92 million dollars. This means, in simple words, that we run those essential and very basic services with about 20% less than the resources we need – which government would accept this for its own education, health and social services? And our 246 million dollar emergency appeal for Gaza and the West Bank in 2007 is, in early December, a little more than half funded. Lack of resources means that we are unable to employ enough teachers, health care and social workers to keep pace with a beneficiary population that is growing in both size and needs. In this way, budget shortfalls directly threaten the quality and even the continuation of our services.

Before handing over to Ambassador Riyad Mansour of Palestine, whose presence here today gives increased significance to this event, together with that of Caroline Ziade, Deputy Permanent Representative of Lebanon, of Rex Brynen of McGill University and of Dominique Buff of the International Committee of the Red Cross (all of whom I warmly welcome), let me conclude from where I started. This is indeed a time of serious concerns, but also – we must hope – of opportunity. As Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd has consistently repeated, the Israeli/Palestine conflict is an international challenge that must be addressed by political actors, but can be solved only if human rights and international humanitarian law are given a prominent place in the political discourse. Given the network of shared interests and concerns in the region, the ultimate guarantee of the security of states is the safety, economic self-sufficiency and protection of all people, including the refugees. Our message is therefore clear: in the immediate, help us provide humanitarian assistance and foster the human development of Palestine refugees; and meanwhile seek a just solution to the refugee problem, without which its financial, political and above all human cost will continue to haunt us.

The consequences of inaction are clear. Besides carrying out our mission with all possible determination, we at UNRWA can only flag the harsh lessons that all of us should be learning from realities on the ground, and appeal to the international community to display the courage and leadership required – today more than ever – to finally achieve peace.