RUTHFULLY YOURS

Freedom’s Edge
Turkey’s Two-Faced Aid For Gaza
Claudia Rosett, 06.04.10, 5:00 PM ET

From the fury with which Turkey’s leaders are demanding carte blanche access for aid to Gaza, you might suppose the Turkish government had exhausted every available route for pouring its own bounty into the Palestinian enclave. Think again. While Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan whips up passions about Israel stopping a blockade-busting “aid” flotilla, his own government has racked up a record as one of the cheapskates of Gaza relief.

United Nations records show that if Gaza has been lean on aid from Turkey in recent years, it’s not because Turkish relief donations have been blocked by the Israelis. It’s because Turkey, relative to its size as a rising economic power, and despite its claims of regional leadership, has been surprisingly stingy about sending aid via the already existing channels of the UN. Apparently, Turkey‘s leaders are glad to enlist the U.N. full force for punishing Israel and stripping Israel’s defenses against the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists who control neighboring Gaza. But the Turks are far less interested in the U.N. when it comes to handing over Turkish goods and cash for U.N. aid efforts.

The chief U.N. agency in Gaza is the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. Love or hate it–and I am no fan–UNRWA, according to its website, is “the main provider of basic services–education, health, relief and social services–to 4.7 million registered Palestine refugees in the Middle East.” Many of those Palestinians live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank. But Gaza is the core of this operation. UNRWA‘s headquarters are in Gaza, where 1.1 million Palestinians–the bulk of Gaza’s population–are registered on UNRWA’s refugee rolls and eligible for its services.

UNRWA gets 98% of its funding from voluntary donations, mostly from U.N. member states. Turkey looks like a great candidate to be a big donor. In 2008 Turkey’s economy was ranked by the World Bank as the 17th largest on the planet. Given the Turkish government’s professed interest in the welfare of Palestinians, you might suppose that Turkey would be among the top 10 state donors to UNRWA? Or at least the top 20?

Turkey doesn’t even make the cut.

The largest donor to UNRWA is the U.S., which in 2009, according to UNRWA’s statistics, gave $268 million. Next is the European Commission, which in 2009 gave $232.7 million. Together, the U.S. and E.U. account for almost half of all UNRWA funding. Other major donors include the U.K., Spain, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and Germany. Or, if you want to measure in terms of donations per capita, notes UNRWA on its website, “Scandinavian countries top the list,” with Sweden in 2009 giving $48.6 million, Norway $39 million and Denmark $19.9 million.

Among UNRWA’s top 20 donors for 2009, there are only two countries from the Middle East: Kuwait, which in 2009 gave $35.5 million, and Saudi Arabia, with $27.6 million.

And in 2009 UNRWA was clamoring even more than usual for donations. The year began with Israel sending troops into Gaza in Operation Cast Lead–an attempt to shut down the thousands of rocket and mortar attacks launched from the Hamas-terrorist-run enclave into Israel. The U.N. put out an emergency appeal for aid. Sympathy for Gaza ran high, and one of the most vocal figures was Turkey’s Erdogan. That January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he made a public display of insulting Israel’s President Shimon Peres and stormed off a shared stage.

But how much did Turkey donate in 2009 to UNRWA? According to an UNRWA spokesman, Turkey ranked 26th on the list, below Belgium, Finland and Ireland. With a Turkish gross domestic product well in excess of $700 billion, the Turkish government gave a total of $1.08 million to UNRWA, of which $578,058 was for the Gaza Emergency Appeal. Non-governmental organizations in Turkey provided another $318,413 worth of food and medical supplies.

This year, with Erdogan cheering for the Turkish-led terror-linked flotilla because it was “carrying aid to poor Palestinian people,” how much have the Turks donated to UNRWA? According to the UNRWA spokesman, Turks have made “no private pledges,” and for 2010 the Turkish government has so far pledged $500,000.

UNRWA statistics for the past decade show a similarly tight-fisted Turkey. Erdogan has been in power since 2002, but on UNRWA’s list of the top 20 donors spanning that period, Turkey doesn’t show up. In March 2009 U.N. Radio reported that Turkey’s “steady” support for UNRWA from 2000-09 had stacked up to a total of $7.4 million. That’s slightly less than Australia gave in 2009 alone.

In the U.N.’s sprawling bureaucracy there are of course other U.N. agencies operating in Gaza. In the U.N.’s database for overall contributions in 2009 to what the U.N. describes as “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Turkey looks slightly more generous, with donations totaling $2.6 million. But slice it how you will, Turkey is one of the penny-pinchers at the U.N. aid table. That’s not for lack of appetite at UNRWA, which complains of being under-funded, with $1.2 billion budgeted for 2009, and $948 million received.

As for the terror-linked Turkish foundation that took the helm of the Gaza flotilla, the IHH, it has been accredited at the U.N. since 2004 as an NGO with consultative status at the General Assembly’s Economic and Social Council. According to a January 2009 bulletin on the IHH website, the IHH has sent millions worth of aid into Gaza, including “monetary aids” of $3,988,048 million. Did the U.N.-accredited IHH donate any of this via UNRWA? Queried by e-mail about this, an UNRWA spokesman replied, “UNRWA has never received any monetary assistance from IHH.”

None of this is meant to endorse UNRWA’s aid empire in Gaza, which has a record of being too often entwined with the terrorist reign of Hamas. That ought to make the U.S. think twice, but it should hardly deter donations from Turkey, where the current government applauds the IHH and refers to Hamas as “brothers.” What’s jarring is that the Turks in the name of aid should be so urgently demanding right now that the U.N. help them break down all barriers meant to keep weapons out of Gaza, while for so many years the same Turks have made so little use of the U.N. aid corridors already in place. But then, it’s not really about milk and medicine for children, is it?

Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.