Publication
Omar Shaban Ismail · Sama News Agency · 2011
Omar Shaban rejects tying continued international funding to Salam Fayyad remaining prime minister or finance minister, calling it financial blackmail that must not halt reconciliation, since aid has been linked to the political system born of Oslo since the 1993 donors' conference in Washington. He cites figures: a clearance transfer of 300 million shekels ($88 million) against a monthly bill of about 600 million shekels ($170 million) covering 114,000 civil and 63,000 military employees; a $1 billion budget with no more than 15% donor dependence under Arafat (1994–2002) against $2.2 billion and 65% dependence under Fayyad (2002–2005) and over $3 billion today. He also criticises $2 billion in debts, consultancy contracts of up to $10,000 a month, and what he calls the “cappuccino economy” of Ramallah.
Omar Shaban, May 2011: linking donor aid to Salam Fayyad staying in office is financial blackmail, refuted by budget, clearance and debt figures.
There is not a single reason that makes us hold on to Mr. Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister, or even as Minister of Finance...
Rather, there are dozens of reasons and justifications that require rejecting this proposition completely. The political will of the Palestinian people and its political forces, which rejected all external pressures against reconciliation and decided to be the owner of its own decision and to implement the people’s will for reconciliation... must expand its will to include breaking free from and ridding itself of financial blackmail as well. It is extremely dangerous to halt the reconciliation process under the pressure of financial blackmail that exists nowhere except in the minds of some who want to instrumentalize the Palestinian people and its future for the sake of their own future. The fabricated and contrived financial crisis has aroused doubt among many sons of the Palestinian people, who realized that this crisis constitutes a dangerous manipulation of people’s feelings and a threat to the stability of society... Here I find no difference between those among these crisis-manufacturers and the Yemeni, Syrian, or Libyan president who employ the capabilities of their states, including the army and bullets, against their citizens in order to remain on the chair. The dozens of articles, international reports, and paid media campaigns that have for four years been trying to brainwash us by saying that Mr. Salam Fayyad is the only condition for the continuation of international funding are nothing but absurd allegations lacking scientific basis, seriousness, and the minimum degree of knowledge. Here I present some reasons and indications by way of example, not limitation:-
· International support for the Palestinian Authority was provided by an international decision to support the peace agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, and this was approved at the first donors’ conference for the Palestinian Authority, which was held in Washington in October 1993. Therefore, international support for the Palestinian Authority is linked to the Palestinian political system and to the Palestinian Authority that was born from the womb of the Oslo Agreement. The first donors’ conference affirmed that international support for the nascent Authority aimed to enable it to carry out its role, namely, promoting peace in the region.
Therefore, international support for the Authority continued even in the presence of the late President Yasser Arafat, despite the donor countries’ objections to his policies and positions, which were never at all in agreement with the requirements of the international community.
Certainly, international support will cease if the Palestinian political system deviates from its function, which falls within the competence of the Authority’s program and not of individuals regardless of their qualifications. This applies fully to Mr. Salam Fayyad, who had no political role, nor was any political role required of him or of his government.
· Merely linking the continuation of support from the international community to the continued tenure of Mr. Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister or Minister of Finance is a linkage no less dangerous than the pressures exerted on the Authority and the Palestinian people not to link Israel’s continuation of settlement activity with the Palestinian Authority’s continuation of the failed peace negotiations.
The international community requires linkage in the first case and requires non-linkage in the second... a blatant example of double standards. If President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian people have rejected the illegitimate linkage between the continuation of settlement activity and the continuation of peace negotiations, then it is more fitting for us to reject as well the illegitimate linkage between the continued tenure of Salam Fayyad and the continuation of funding. Both are matters related to sovereignty, the independence of Palestinian decision-making, and national dignity.
· Mr. Salam Fayyad’s repeated statements on every occasion—whether at the opening of a water pipe, a street, a school, or even at the opening of a seminar on reproductive awareness—that the Authority would free itself from dependence on donor countries by the year 2013, that is, in less than only two years, or by another calculation, in less than twenty months... The question is: how can the current situation be interpreted in light of these statements, and which are we to believe??
The stark contradiction between those statements and the current reality falls within the scope of political deception, for which formal law and public accountability must hold him responsible...
· The tax transfers owed to us by the Israeli government, which were transferred a few days ago, are the result of the clearance process between our purchases from them and their purchases from us. Three hundred million shekels were transferred, equivalent to 88 million dollars, as Haaretz reported in its issue published yesterday.
Meanwhile, the monthly bill of the National Authority amounts to about 600 million shekels, equivalent to 170 million dollars, covering the salaries of 114,000 civilian employees and 63,000 military employees, as well as operating expenses. That is, the clearance transfers cover only 50% of the total monthly bill of the Authority, meaning that half of the employees’ salaries could have been paid without waiting for the transfers from Israel. More important than that, the transfers are the tax paid by Palestinians on their purchases from Israel; in other words, we the people pay ourselves. And the more our purchases from Israel increase, the greater the value of the tax transfers remitted to us by Israel will be. And if the Palestinian people were, hypothetically, to decide to stop buying altogether from Israel for one month, the National Authority would then have to pay tax transfers to Israel, God forbid.
· The policy of Mr. Salam Fayyad, from the very first moment he was brought into the political system as Minister of Finance at the end of 2002, was always based on the deliberate and unjustified inflation of the public budget in a way that led to increased dependence on donor countries.
The late President Abu Ammar was able to maintain a public budget worth only one billion dollars annually over eight years (1994–2002), with a donor dependence ratio not exceeding 15%, and he had to start from zero... whereas Mr. Salam Fayyad worked to inflate the budget substantially so that it reached two billion two hundred million dollars annually in three years (2002–2005), with a donor dependence ratio that reached 65%, without having to start from zero, for he received a productive and prosperous economy whose growth rate for the year 2000 reached about 8%. The budget of Fayyad’s government for the current year exceeded three billion dollars, of course without any development projects in the Gaza Strip.
· What has been happening in the West Bank since the split in June 2007, in terms of the massive injection of international support, was aimed primarily at deepening the split and making the losses of those benefiting from it so great as to push them to take positions against reconciliation. It is a bribe from the international community to some so that they will stand against national unity. You may imagine what the Palestinian situation would have been had the international community not rushed to feed the split by pumping in those huge sums of money. The comparison between the resounding failure of the Annapolis peace conference in September 2007 and the unexpected success of the donors’ conference on 17 December in Paris of the same year is sufficient to demonstrate the intentions of the international community toward us. What is happening in the West Bank, especially in the city of Ramallah, in terms of economic activities, is a reinforcement of a non-productive rentier economy. It is nothing more than illusory and superficial prosperity that has absolutely no relation to sustainable human development, and I have described it in my articles as the “cappuccino economy”: it is like the foam of a cappuccino drink, which appears beautiful and swollen, but quickly disappears.
· At the Sharm El-Sheikh Conference, which was held on March 2, 2009 after the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, with the aim of reconstructing what the war had destroyed, and in which 90 states and institutions participated, no one from the Gaza Strip was present. The reason given at the time was “lack of space.” It is ironic that the conference halls were spacious enough for representatives from 90 countries, yet too cramped for a few individuals from the Gaza Strip, who were the people most directly concerned. Even more astonishing than that, the plan submitted by Mr. Salam Fayyad to the conference amounted to $2.5 billion, of which 40% was allocated to the Gaza Strip, while the rest was for supporting the Palestinian Authority’s general budget and spending on projects that include propaganda.
One people’s misfortunes are another people’s gains...
· The Palestinian Attorney General, as well as the head of the Illicit Gains Commission, have confirmed that many ministers in Mr. Salam Fayyad’s government are surrounded by strong suspicions of corruption, and that they are awaiting the lifting of their immunity in order to begin their investigations with them. The question is: why has this not been done??
· Mr. Salam Fayyad’s recent statements to Ma’an News Agency (an agency whose unlimited love for him I envy) about the existence of debts on the Authority amounting to $2 billion, adding that the next prime minister must think about how to repay them... here many questions impose themselves....
Why did you not say this previously!! And why did you allow this debt to swell!!
Where were those debts spent!!
And why do you ask the next prime minister to bear their burden!! Is that not a veiled threat meaning: either me or things will collapse!! ... And what guarantees can you give us that your continuation as prime minister will not bring this debt to four billion dollars, for example!! And if countries keep foreign currency reserves in the central bank as collateral for such debts,
please tell us... what do we have to pledge as collateral for these debts other than our political decision and our freedom...
· The discretionary expenditures of Mr. Salam Fayyad’s government represent a large proportion that is in no way consistent with the Authority’s financial situation and is wholly at odds with the repeated talk—which has given us headaches—about transparency and austerity. Mr. Salam Fayyad’s government also contracts dozens of local and international consultants, with fantastical remunerations reaching ten thousand dollars per month for a consultant. I can almost state with certainty that these remunerations did not wait for Israel’s transfer of the tax allocations in order to be paid. It is worth noting here that these contracts are not included within the budget and are not announced in the newspapers, in violation of the principle of equal opportunity, and they are among the means used to win loyalty and praise. This is also the case with some media websites, and this is what Bassam Zakarneh, head of the Union of Public Employees, confirmed in the report published by Ma’an Agency on Tuesday, May 17, where he spoke of “paying salaries through contracts to some in the amount of four thousand dollars, more or less, and purchasing 23 cars for the Ministry of Finance under these circumstances, and disbursing sums exceeding 250 million shekels during this week without urgent justification, including about 120 million for the ministries as discretionary expenses, and paying the salaries of contract employees and other matters we do not know about, to the point that one bank disbursed 40 million shekels from the Ministry of Finance account in a single day during the past week.”
· Mr. Salam Fayyad always turns toward the West... in his view, the sun rises in the West... He is constantly visiting Western countries and has rarely visited Arab or Islamic countries, even though they are our natural incubator as a people and a cause. And if the West sees in Mr. Salam Fayyad an unprecedented genius, I suggest that he be chosen as prime minister in Belgium or France, or even in the United States of America, which does not have the post of prime minister. I suggest that America invent this post, just as it imposed it on us in 2002, and appoint him as its prime minister, especially since he holds its citizenship, and incidentally this is sufficient reason for him not to hold such a post among us. Egyptian law, for example, prohibits those who hold other nationalities from assuming any sovereign position.
Topic: Palestinian Economy — Salam Fayyad · PA budget · clearance revenues · donor dependence — Text © Sama News Agency — archived here with attribution to the source. — Original source