PRESS BRIEFING BY UNRWA

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY UNRWA

At a Headquarters press briefing yesterday afternoon, William Lee, Chief of the New York Liaison Office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), said that $19 million in new pledges had enabled UNWRA to revoke certain cuts in services to the Palestinian refugees. Nevertheless, the demand for those services was outpacing donor contributions, calling into question the future of the Agency.

Mr. Lee said UNWRA had been providing humanitarian assistance to the Palestine refugees since 1948. Those refugees today numbered more than 3.4 million -- with some 1.4 million in Jordan, 1.2 million in Gaza along the West Bank and approximately 350,000 each in Lebanon and Syria.

He said the Agency provided education, health and relief services and some social programmes to refugees living in camps -- accounting for 40 per cent of the total refugee population -- as well as to those outside of camps. The education programme was by far its largest service, providing 9 to 10 years of schooling to more than 400,000 pupils in 640 schools throughout the region. It employed 13,000 teaching staff, virtually all of them Palestinians. The Agency's health programme was community-based, based on a network of 120 clinics. Those clinics treated 6 million patients a year and offered preventive mother and child health care among its specialized services.

The UNWRA operated under a renewable mandate from the General Assembly, with the current one in effect until June 1999, Mr. Lee said. It was funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions from the international community. The list of major donors included the members of the European Union, both collectively and individually; the United States, the largest single cash- donor country; the Nordic countries; and Japan.

The Agency's cash budget this year was $312 million, which included $50 million that had been frozen owing to funding shortfalls in previous years, he said. It had experienced four consecutive years of budget deficits since 1993. The Agency managed to get by from year to year, in part by dipping into its working capital reserves, which had now been depleted. The problem had become "not only chronic, but structural".

Mr. Lee said that in 1993 and again in 1996, the Commissioner-General had imposed austerity measures involving non-recruitment of much needed additional staff. There were more pupils every year. "We can build the classrooms with special money contributed for that purpose, but we cannot put teachers in the classrooms" without the necessary funding. Also frozen was the annual provision of $12.7 million set aside for termination expenses. Those were the entitlements that UNWRA would pay its 23,000 local staff upon the Agency's eventually demise. The UNWRA was, after all, a temporary agency

whose eventual aim was to go out of business once the refugee problem was solved.

Overall, those reductions had cut this year's budget to $262 million, Mr. Lee said. By the middle of the year, it was clear that there would be a shortfall of approximately $20 million. So, UNWRA launched an emergency appeal at the end of last year and early this year and imposed austerity measures. In August, Commissioner-General Peter Hansen announced, for the first time in its 47-year operating history, actual reductions in Agency programmes, including the possible imposition of school fees. Free education, provided by UNWRA all those years, was viewed as a right, a commitment by the international community to the refugees. The possible imposition of fees was met with sharp criticism. Also frozen was the recruitment of 250 teachers needed to fill classrooms which were now bulging -- with 60 students in classrooms smaller than the size of the briefing room.

Mr. Lee said that the $20 million pledged yesterday would enable UNWRA to cancel the proposed school fee "for now" and to reinstate another cut -- a two-month freeze on payments for hospitalization. Nevertheless, some of the other measures announced in August would have to remain in place. In short, "the outlook is still very grim", and as Mr. Hansen had said, "we are not out of the woods". The UNWRA could perhaps survive this year, but the outlook for next year was uncertain. The Agency would enter 1998 with a budget deficit for the fifth consecutive year and carry into the new biennium the cumulative effects of four rounds of austerity measures which had affected the quality of the services, as well as its obligation to pay staff their termination benefits.

Contributions by reliable and generous donors such as the Netherlands, Denmark and the Nordic countries, and the United States were well above their assessed rate of contributions to the United Nations as a whole, Mr. Lee said. Other countries, including those which supported the Palestinian cause and voted in support of UNWRA in the General Assembly each year, had not contributed anything at all. The problem "will get worse before it gets better, but at least we got through 1997", he said.

Was this going to be an exercise in brinkmanship from year to year, requiring dramatic activity to receive support? a correspondent asked. "We don't see it as brinkmanship", Mr. Lee said. Certainly the reaction in the region to the announced cuts, however predictable, indicated how important UNWRA was in the lives of millions of people, and how destabilizing was any reduction or failure to carry through on its commitments.

He said the Agency wished to make clear that "this is no longer just an isolated regional problem for which a few countries have borne responsibility for many years and should continue to bear responsibility -- it is an international issue". The question of the Palestinian refugees was deeply

UNRWA Briefing - 3 - 11 September 1997

embedded in the Middle East peace process, and UNWRA was viewed as a part of that process. It was important, therefore, to establish a partnership with the donor community, the refugee community and the host countries.

Asked if he could name the countries who repeatedly voted in support of UNWRA but did not contribute to it, Mr. Lee said he did not consider it useful to name names, but speculation pointed to the wealthier countries in the region of the Middle East, for example. The Gulf countries, historically, had contributed to UNWRA and were continuing to do so, particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Certain countries were trying to find a way to support UNWRA without taking on what was viewed as political responsibility for the refugee problem.

Asked for a breakdown of UNWRA staff, particularly how many were former or current refugees, Mr. Lee said that most of the staff employed by UNWRA, by far, were refugees. The UNWRA employees were considered the privileged segment of the refugee population. They were the teachers, the doctors and medical staff, and professional workers of very high calibre. A university degree was required to teach first grade in some areas supported by UNWRA. Indeed, many of the Agency's staff still lived in camps, among the people whom they served.

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