Sudan needs it much more
By Moshe Elad
October 10, 2005
Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/633538.html


The Palestinian Authority features prominently in the 400-page Human Development Report 2005 recently issued by the United Nations Development Program. The report ranks each of the 177 countries affiliated with the UN according to an index combining three main components: income, health and education.

The PA, referred to in the report as the occupied Palestinian territories, is included in a unique and unfavorable category characterized as follows on page 75 of the report: Aid has not always played a positive role in supporting human development, partly because of failures on the side of aid recipients and partly because donor countries have allowed strategic considerations to override development concerns.

There is perhaps no better way to describe the special treatment donor countries extend to the PA. Sometimes this positive discrimination reaches scandalous proportions.

Three main conclusions can be derived from an examination of this comprehensive report: First, the PA has received preferential treatment, without any relationship to its situation or needs. Second, there is no justification for granting such broad assistance to the PA when it shows no signs of becoming more efficient. And third, the excessive financial assistance provided to the PA has actually hindered its development.

In a world in which 2.5 billion people, mostly in Africa, Asia, and Central and Southern America, live on less than $2 a day (half of them live on less than $1 a day); and in a world in which 10 million children die each year in these regions before reaching the age of 5, and 850 million people suffer from serious malnutrition - in such a world, for some reason the three million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip receive the second highest rate of assistance in the world - $288.6 per capita. In Sudan, for example, where two million people have perished during the past decade and six million were forced to leave their homes, external aid is only $18.5 per capita.

The report also contradicts the slanted reports from various parties (most of whom harbor special interests), which warn of dire economic and health disasters in PA territory. The UN report divides the 177 countries into three categories of human development: High - the developed countries, Medium - mid-level countries, and Low - the weak countries. The PA is in the Medium category, ranked higher than most of the Arab states.

The PA is in seventh place out of 103 developing countries in the report's human poverty index, on a par with Singapore, Cuba and Colombia, and ahead of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The report says that were it not for the intifada, the PA's situation would be much better, because the four years of violence have more than doubled the poverty rate.

The authors of the report did not have the courage to take the next step and demand that the donor countries restrain their fervor for supporting the occupied Palestinian territories beyond reasonable requirements.

The PA regime bears responsibility for the ongoing failures: corruption, wasted donations, lack of transparency and so on. If, for example, Arafat, Abu Mazen and their colleagues had exercised appropriate responsibility with the funds received since 1994, developing industrial and tourism infrastructure, creating places of employment and ceasing to fund terrorist organizations in the guise of maintaining security forces, today every Palestinian in the territories might have a job, apartment and even a small car.

The rescue missions conducted by the U.S., Europe and Japan not only fail to solve the basic problems of Palestinian society, but are liable to prevent effective programs for fundamental change. Establishing the PA on a tradition of aid and charity, instead of organized, independent work by the government, is liable to only exacerbate the situation and place in doubt the PA's ability to establish an independent state.

Colonel (res.) Elad served in senior positions in the territories and is now engaged in studing Palestinian society.