Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
1 July 2010
Ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to thank Meiji University, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and JICA for hosting this event and for inviting me to join you today at this centre of scholarly excellence. It is also humbling to be able to be here in the company of such distinguished guests. Thank you Mr Takemasa, for allowing me to join you today and I would like to thank Mr Naya, President of Meiji University and also Professor Fukuda for hosting us at Meiji University. I am especially honoured to be able to share a panel with the President of JICA, Mrs Sadako Ogata, having been inspired by her wisdom and commitment when we worked together during her tenure as UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
My remarks today are entitled “Building Opportunities: UNRWA and Palestine Refugees in Today’s Middle East.” One could think this is a somewhat ironic title when referring to a region that has sadly been embroiled in conflict and countless tragedies over the years, and to an issue – that of Palestine refugees – unresolved for the past six decades. The Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, evoke a long and tragic string of missed chances for peace. And yet I will endeavour to demonstrate that despite the numerous crises affecting the 4.7 million Palestine refugees whom UNRWA serves, there are a number of opportunities to be sought and seized which can improve their lives, and in so doing, can make a significant contribution to the overall stability of the region.
Before developing these ideas further, I hope you do not mind if I provide you with a little background on the organisation which I have the honour of leading, and which is not so well known outside the region in which it operates. UNRWA, an almost unpronounceable acronym that stands for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was created by the UN General Assembly in 1949 and began its operations in May 1950. It was charged to care for Palestine refugees – meaning those whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, and who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. The organisation was never intended to be a permanent UN body, as it was hoped that a peaceful resolution to the refugee crisis would be found shortly after the conflict. However, and tragically so, such a solution continues to be elusive, and refugees, after more than 60 years, are still in exile – a situation compounded over the decades by further conflicts, displacement and violations of rights. As a result, the Agency’s mandate has been renewed by the General Assembly every three years, and UNRWA, now 60 years old, is still an important player on the Middle East scene.
Unlike most UN organisations, UNRWA delivers its services – education, health, and relief - directly to the refugees themselves. We do not work through other organisations, nor do we assist governments in providing these services; we simply provide them.
Despite being based in a very complicated region, UNRWA’s work is very straightforward with its interventions described in its name – Relief and Works. The relief role is quite clear and is what we are usually best known for. Many remember the images from the war in Gaza last year, for example, when UNRWA staff bravely continued to carry out their work to serve the affected population. They responded under terrible conditions; sheltered tens of thousands; continued with the distribution of food; provided health care whenever and wherever possible; and mitigated the psychological impact of war, especially on children. Yet limiting one’s understanding of UNRWA to its response to humanitarian crises would mean neglecting the Agency’s primary role and functions.
This greater understanding is found within the word “Works”. This is an old-fashioned term for development; an approach to UNRWA’s mandate that is not about handing out sacks of flour, but rather an investment in people – the refugees - so that they may develop their potential in spite of the constraints imposed by exile, and despite the fact that they are still deprived of their own state. This “human development” approach began at the outset of the Agency’s operations. It is especially its massive investment in refugee children through education that symbolises what UNRWA has been and continues to be for generations of Palestinians.
The “works” of today’s UNRWA are therefore more like those of a public service than a UN organisation. Our goals are fully in concert with the Millennium Development Goals and are pursued through very tangible and basic services provided through a work force of 30,000 staff – nearly all of whom are also Palestine refugees.
500,000 children learn every day in our nearly 700 schools in the occupied Palestinian territory, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, staffed by almost 20,000 UNRWA teachers. Our doctors conduct thousands of patient consultations throughout the same geographic territory in over 130 health centres. We help the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable escape poverty; we develop infrastructure in the 58 refugee camps in the region; we have micro finance and micro enterprise programmes that not only help bring people out of poverty, but also invest in the extraordinarily entrepreneurial spirit of Palestinians.
It is this concrete and extremely important work that attracted me and many others to UNRWA in the first place; it is an approach that puts individuals at the centre of our interventions and focuses our attention on how to improve their lives; their communities; and, through them, the region. At its core, it is very similar to the modern paradigm of human security; a concept influencing the foreign policy of many actors, including Japan, and one that owes its development to a number of experts and practitioners, including Mrs Ogata. It holds that if the basics are provided for and the individual is safe, secure, and has the ability to grow and reach his or her potential, we can both improve people’s lives and reduce conflict.
This is particularly relevant in the Middle East; a turbulent area where conflict and crises are prevalent. The greatest and most encompassing of the crises before us is the apparent lack of progress in the peace process, which has an immeasurable impact on all peoples living in the region. While UNRWA is not a political actor, it is affected by the political decisions taken – or often not taken – by the international community with regard to the peace process. While I will not dwell on the lack of peace and the political arguments, let it be said that this must remain our collective goal and it is peace that we must all work towards.
Yet let us not forget that peace in the Middle East is not merely an abstract term or distant goal left to states and statesmen to discuss. Rather we must always remember that for each day, each month, each year and each decade that passes without a solution, there is a human cost as millions of people remain without a recognition of their rights; without an understanding of their suffering and need for security; and without a state.
Ladies and gentlemen,
We should be neither naïve nor complacent. As progress towards peace stagnates in the political domain, efforts to provide opportunities to millions of refugees face daunting challenges. Palestinians live amidst multiple and mutually compounding crises, which slow down, complicate and sometimes halt these efforts. No challenge is greater than the 43-year Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which continues to inflict a terrible cost upon the population.
Occupation, for Palestinians and Palestine refugees, is the antithesis of human development and is harsh and merciless throughout the Palestinian territory. It manifests itself in various ways, from the controls imposed on Palestinian movements in the West Bank, to house demolitions, forced evictions and expropriations throughout that area and especially significant in East Jerusalem, to the Gaza blockade.
I wish to elaborate in particular on the situation in Gaza because it provides a clear example of how human development efforts can be hampered by this form of occupation – and yet of how important it is to support the people to prevent an entire population from losing hope and trust in the international community.
In Gaza, UNRWA serves 70 percent of the 1.5 million people squeezed into a tiny sliver of land on the Mediterranean. Our programmes and relief efforts have been insufficient to mitigate the all encompassing effects of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, now entering its fourth year. This unacceptable and counterproductive blockade has generated a crisis far greater and more extensive than a “humanitarian” one, which could be addressed through the provision of food and medicine to meet the basic humanitarian needs of the population. This crisis has affected all aspects of life for every single person living in the Gaza Strip.
Gazans survive under terrible conditions. Cut off not only from the rest of the world, but also the rest of their own territory, they are largely unable to exit the coastal enclave to travel; to work or study abroad or to seek urgent and life saving medical services that are not available from the crumbling health facilities. Although Israel has allowed some basic goods into Gaza since June 2007, this amounts, on average, to approximately 20 to 25 percent of the pre-blockade figure each month and has, until recently, been limited to approximately 100 items. To put this blockade into perspective, a typical Western supermarket stocks 10,000 – 15,000 items on its shelves.
The legitimate economy has been destroyed, with businesses and factories forced to shut down and dismiss employees. The people’s only respite from this blockade has been the digging of tunnels under the border between Gaza and Egypt, creating – literally – an underground economy. Thrust upon the people of Gaza by the blockade, this illegal network has brought in some of the needed goods and has become one of the few sources of employment in Gaza.
In addition to the business and social crises, the blockade has metastasised into poor school performance, deteriorating physical and mental health conditions and widespread poverty with 80 percent of the population reliant on UN food handouts. Unemployment has spiked in the past three years and now hovers around the almost unimaginable rate of 40 percent. The blockade has damaged the environment and the public health of the population with – for example – approximately 80 million litres of sewage pumped into the sea each day due to a lack of electricity and spare parts to repair equipment required to treat the waste. According to the World Health Organisation, 90 percent of the water is now unsafe to drink.
The work of UN Agencies has not been spared the consequences of the blockade. For example, UNRWA has had over 93 million dollars of fully funded building projects – including important projects funded by the Government of Japan – suspended since the summer of 2007 because of the Israeli prohibition on importing the required materials. This has prevented us from rehousing those in need of homes and from building some of the schools needed to reduce the overcrowded classrooms. We could not even begin to undertake the massive reconstruction effort needed in the wake of the last war.
I expanded on the situation in Gaza to give you a tangible sense of the human disaster generated by the occupation of the Palestinian territory. I could talk about many other examples – from the hardship endured by Bedouin refugees in the southern West Bank as they progressively lose access to their lands and livelihoods due to the expansion of Israeli settlements, to that of Palestinians evicted from their homes just a few steps away from where the international community has its diplomatic offices in East Jerusalem. The list is long, tragic and worrying. Yet, I do not wish to be misunderstood, as we often are – deliberately or not – when we speak about the occupation. Let me therefore repeat that the security of the people of Israel must be preserved through appropriate means, and the United Nations, including UNRWA, will continue to condemn the launching of rockets from Gaza and any other attack against civilians as serious violations of international law. But it is incumbent on those of us who work with Palestinian communities under occupation to stress once again how significantly, deeply and perhaps irremediably it is impacting on people’s lives; and how it is not only affecting chances to offer people a better future, but also to make them convinced stakeholders in a difficult peace process: in breeding extremism and radicalization, occupation – be it through the blockade of Gaza or the humiliations inflicted daily at the checkpoints in the West Bank – shows how counterproductive it has become.
Yet despite this dire picture, I am a firm believer that all hope is not lost. We have seen for example, when movement restrictions are lifted, a rapid improvement in the development of local economies in areas of the West Bank. It is clearly not enough, but it is evidence that the Palestinians are able to succeed when given the opportunity to do so.
In Gaza, too, there is a window of opportunity for a change in approach. It is tragic that it took the entirely unnecessary loss of human lives in the recent attack on some boats carrying aid to generate renewed international pressure to end this terrible situation and reverse the years of de-development in Gaza. We hope that world leaders will now match their words with the political determination required to end the blockade. The Israeli government has announced some measures aimed at relieving pressure on the Gaza Strip. While any improvement from the present situation is welcome, of course, it is important that easing the blockade – just slightly – does not become another way of maintaining it. As many world leaders have stated in the past few days, the purpose is to lift the blockade in a manner that takes into account the legitimate security concerns of the State of Israel and the legitimate – and long neglected – rights of the civilian population of Gaza to proper services, functioning infrastructure, a restored economy and decent standards of living. This is why we have said that the announced measures must be carefully examined – through real and speedy implementation, not on paper – before stating that they represent real progress.
UNRWA and the UN are ready to play a significant role in the reconstruction of Gaza, but we must be assured that conditions to carry out this vast and complex task are fully met. If that happened, many possibilities could open up for the people living in this tormented piece of land. The window of opportunity is small, but it is there. It must be seized now, before it is too late.
Crises and opportunities for refugees exist also elsewhere in the region. The lives of Palestine refugees in Lebanon, for example, have been affected not only by six decades of exile, but also by civil war, political strife and instability, resulting in high levels of poverty and sometimes – as in the case of the 30,000 from the northern camp of Nahr el Bared, destroyed in 2007 – fresh displacement. The issue of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is fraught with complexities and political difficulties as they continue to suffer from a severe deficit of basic rights and from dismal living conditions, especially in refugee camps. Lebanese political leaders however are now courageously examining how to amend the laws excluding refugees from the legal work force, which would reverse decades of deprivation. UNRWA encourages this extraordinary and historic effort, which we hope will help foster improved living conditions for the refugees, giving them opportunities to contribute to their communities and to the Lebanese economy, and significantly help improve relations between Palestinians and Lebanese and further stabilise the country, while – and this should be very clear – maintaining intact their status as refugees and preserving the rights and entitlements refugees currently possess.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The challenges I have described are extraordinary and cannot be taken lightly. And today we have a choice that we must make. We can balk and despair, or we can seize the very opportunities that are present before us to make a difference to the 4.7 million Palestine refugees and to the Middle East.
UNRWA sees, and seizes, these opportunities every day through its services and the security it provides to the refugees so they can become increasingly healthy, educated and prosperous.
UNRWA’s primary and vocational education programmes are examples of its commitment to provide refugees with the tools and skills that expand their horizons and assist them towards self-reliance. That emphasis on self-reliance was, unlike many others working in the region and at the time, instilled in both boys and girls from a very early age. From its initial days, UNRWA pioneered gender parity in its schools in an effort to ensure that the entire population was enabled with the basic ability to read and write; to learn and to think so that they could have further opportunities to seize later in life.
Our micro finance programme plays a similar role. It offers the financial support needed to compete in the marketplace for economic rewards – support which would otherwise be unavailable. Similarly, this programme also ensures active female participation, with a particularly successful lending product for women entrepreneurs.
We have excellent examples of planning and reconstruction achievements founded on greater refugee participation and on partnerships with civil society groups. In 2007, Nahr el Bared refugee camp in Northern Lebanon was destroyed during a fierce conflict between the Lebanese Army and militants that had infiltrated the refugee camp. The result was the destruction of the entire camp, in which 30,000 Palestine refugees lived. UNRWA is now in the process of rebuilding it; a first for us as we are essentially reconstructing an entire town for the 30,000 inhabitants. The new and innovative approach to camp improvement has been invaluable during the planning phase of the reconstruction and has demonstrated once again what can be accomplished through cooperation with the refugees and with their constructive input into improving their own lives.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I have made our case for opportunities in the realm of improving the personal development of individuals. However, and as always when speaking about refugees, one should not neglect that an active approach to seeking and seizing opportunities would also be useful in the search for a negotiated solution to the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. Political work is not UNRWA’s responsibility. Yet, I would be remiss if I did not say that instead of looking at refugees as a 'problem’ that could upset the delicate political balance, we should look at this dispersed population as an asset to influence positively the direction of the peace process to ensure that the peace will be just and therefore lasting. In order to do this, we must promote a better understanding among international actors of the connection between refugees – as people – and peace in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become extraordinarily complex and the search for a solution extremely difficult: clearly the peace process today needs to have more supporters and fewer enemies. Better living conditions, broader rights and greater life choices for refugees, and – above all – proper consideration for their views and perspectives, will improve the prospect that refugees contribute to and support the search for a solution to the conflict.
But let me insist in particular on the point I have tried to make. The refugees of whom we speak – all 4.7 million in the Middle East as well as those in the global diaspora – are a substantial reservoir of human capital. They constitute, in effect, a massive opportunity waiting to be grasped, and they stand ready to contribute significantly to the socio-economic viability of the region and of a future Palestinian State. Given their numbers and human development potential, Palestine refugees are a formidable constituency for peace with a substantial stake in the stability of the region.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Let me talk about one more challenge before I conclude. UNRWA is a voluntarily funded organisation, which relies on the generosity of its donors in order to carry out its humanitarian and human development work. Unfortunately, in large part due to the global economic crisis, UNRWA today faces a dramatic shortfall in its budget which threatens its solvency and its very ability to implement the mandate that it has received from the international community. Approximately 100m US dollars are required – in addition to voluntary contributions and pledges already made, very generously, by donor governments – in order for UNRWA to carry out its work throughout this year. If the shortfall persists, it will mean serious interruptions or dramatic reductions in our services.
Now that (I hope) you better understand UNRWA’s work, its contribution to the population it serves, and its role in the stability of a volatile region, you will agree with me that this is a very worrying prospect. It would mean tens of thousands of patients not seeing doctors; the poorest of the poor without their safety net; businesses collapsing without their financing and loans; infrastructure in further decline; and – most concerning to me – 500,000 refugee children on the streets without an education each day that we cease operations.
The consequence of such a failure would be compounded by what would inevitably be perceived by the 4.7 million refugees in the region as the international community’s neglect for them; their rights and recognition of their displacement and dispossession. It would fuel the perception that the international community has gone back on its promise to stand with the refugees until a just and lasting solution has been found to their plight.
In this respect, let me use this forum to make a special appeal to the people and government of this great and generous country, which – over the years, and in particular through my work with Mrs Ogata and others in government – I have learned to admire as a strong contributor to humanitarian and development work. Japan has been a crucial donor to UNRWA since the early 50s, and has helped Palestinians in many different ways. Unfortunately, and as a consequence of a general decrease in its overseas development aid, Japan’s contributions to UNRWA have dramatically declined in recent years. True, important refugee projects have been made possible thanks to Japan’s support – in Gaza, the West Bank and most recently in Syria. But my call today is for Japan to restore its role as one of the key contributors to UNRWA’s core activities – in particular education, health and relief to the poor. I do realize that it is difficult for Japan to make additional efforts at a time of great financial and economic pressure, with other, closer crises competing for attention. However, the conflict in the Middle East – of which Palestine refugees are a consequence, but in the solution to which they must be part – is too strategically important for the international community, including Japan, to consider as distant and peripheral. Withdrawing support from the Palestinian refugee communities will create a dangerous void, and inevitable tensions, at a time when the peace process remains fragile. Said in other words, and from the perspective of refugees and UNRWA, the future of Palestinian children is inextricably linked to the future of the children of Japan, and contributing to the education, health and welfare of the former will ensure a better future for both.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Refugees are, by their very definition, not meant to be left alone. The very definition of refugees binds us – the international community – to them; not only through our empathy and shared humanity for their plight; but also through the international legal instruments and assistance mechanisms which guide our collective response. It is thus imperative that we stand with them until a just and lasting solution to their plight is found.
129 years ago, a group of young lawyers established Meiji University in order to “foster bright capable youths who would lead a modern civil society in Japan.” This vision, set for this fine institute, is easily applicable to UNRWA’s mission today as we strive, with the same determination and persistence as the founders of this university, to help build a better future for Palestine refugees.
Let us not fail in our responsibilities to the refugees. Let us not turn our backs on a people in need of our assistance. Let us not void our obligations and leave them alone. Instead, let us seize the opportunities that are before us and help this displaced and dispossessed community take full advantage of its great potential. Let us support them in their quest for human development and human security and let us uphold their just and overdue wishes and hopes. As we face a future fraught with difficulties in the Middle East and beyond, we will all stand to gain from having seized these opportunities.
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