Care and Suspicion Corruption as Definition in Humanitarian Relations
Abstract
Despite the ubiquity of humanitarian language, action, and sentiment in our current world, there has been no consensus on the precise definition of humanitarianism. Humanitarian obligations, jurisdiction, limits, and even actors remain unsettled and often hotly contested. Suspicions about motives and probity, often articulated through the language of corruption, play a key role in these contests. Through a consideration of humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees, this essay advances several related arguments about how corruption operates in humanitarianism. Most broadly, suspicions and accusations of corruption play an important role in the on-the-ground work of defining what humanitarianism is for providers and recipients. They do so, in part, through (1) establishing and elaborating the refugee as a category of humanitarian governance and personhood and (2) articulating and consolidating an array of obligations and responsibilities across the humanitarian field. Viewed through the lens of concerns about corruption, refugees appear as ethically comprised subjects not because of their inherent qualities but due to their circumstances. Humanitarian governance responds in various ways to this perceived incapacity. Refugees not only are the targets of corruption management but also make their own accusations.
The humanitarian orientation toward people who need assistance is meant to be one of care and concern, and to a considerable degree it is. At the same time, limits in humanitarian capacity, resources, and finances often necessitate strict boundaries on eligibility for aid. These boundaries mean that this orientation also has to be one of suspicion and distrust. Providers of humanitarian aid are compelled to root out fraud, duplicity, and misuse of resources among recipients (Daniel and Knudsen 1995; Fassin and D’Halluin 2005). And it is not only providers who express suspicion. Recipients of humanitarian aid are acutely attentive to misappropriation, favoritism, and partiality among providers (Ewins et al. 2006; Vestergaard 2014). Such expressions of distrust by refugees and aid providers help shape the material, conceptual, and affective landscape of humanitarian relations (Daniel and Knudsen 1995).
I argue here that all of these forms of wrongdoing are treated as instances of corruption. Corruption is often thought of as a failure of public institutions to follow law and procedure because of the pursuit of private gain and advantage. Such corruption requires willing (eager?) individual participants, but it is the institutional failure or deceit that is deemed to be the core of the problem.1 Thus, the corruption label seems to attach more readily to organizations (whether a state, private, or international agency) charged with a public responsibility than to aid recipients (whether refugees or impoverished citizens) who are private subjects. In effect, however, by virtue of their need and their acceptance of assistance, aid recipients are deprived of the opportunity to remain wholly private. Their behavior is deemed a matter of considerable public concern and, even if it does not fit the lexicon of institutions like Transparency International, is viewed by humanitarian aid providers as potentially corrupt. That corruption is understood as attributable to all actors in a humanitarian system directly affects how people evaluate each other. It also means that suspicion is endemic to the system.
Anthropologists have opened up a broad conceptual terrain for thinking about the meaning, boundaries, and effects of corruption, particularly in the domain of the state and government-citizen relations (Gupta 2012; Hetherington 2011; Pierce 2016; Smith 2007). The field of humanitarian relations bears important similarities with that of state relations, particularly with respect to concerns about welfare provision and recipients. In humanitarian contexts, corruption suspicions and accusations serve as a lens through which providers and refugees understand each other, a terrain on which they interact, and a vector for the forwarding of claims and complaints among multiple actors. Furthermore, the differently articulated definitions of corruption and the mechanisms to manage and combat it that emerge from these articulations are also crucial in defining what humanitarianism is for the various actors in its dynamic.
This essay takes humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees as its case. It draws on fieldwork conducted over many years in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank and archival research documenting the long Palestinian experience of aid and displacement, and it also includes material on Syria and the Gaza Strip. Accusations of corruption involve charges about both personal character and systemic orientation. Concerns about corruption ensure that suspicion, distance, and distrust are central to the humanitarian dynamic. In this essay, I work to identify both some of what corruption is (the constellation of practices that are so named) and some of what corruption does (how it structure relationships, both affectively and practically). Corruption accusations surface in many parts of the humanitarian system. I focus on rations: the policing of eligibility for such aid, the procedures for registration on the rolls, and the management of delivery and use of such goods.
The conceptual universe of corruption includes many actions, behaviors, and attitudes. In the case of the humanitarian system, what links the diverse ways of talking about corruption is a claim that certain policies and practices are subverting the “proper” working of the humanitarian apparatus. The language of corruption ties together a diverse array of “bad” practices—including fraud, nepotism, misuse of resources, and duplicity—and identifies them as similar sorts of failings. I have elsewhere described humanitarianism as “a tradition of ‘compromised action,’ in which humanitarian organizations can be distinguished not by whether they make such compromises but, instead, by which ones they make” (Feldman 2007b:701). Here I suggest that efforts to name and combat corruption are a means through which determinations are made about which compromises would be too much and would threaten the fundamental humanitarian character of the enterprise. Like everything else about humanitarian practice, these claims are contested and unsettled.
I advance several related arguments about how corruption operates in humanitarianism. Most broadly, as noted above, suspicions and accusations of corruption play an important role in the on-the-ground work of defining humanitarianism for providers and recipients of humanitarian aid. Some might think that such definitional work is the concern of policy makers and scholars alone, with people in the field only concerned with the technicalities of aid management. My research with Palestinian refugees and humanitarian aid providers confirms that questions of definition are regularly debated on the ground. Suspicions and accusations of corruption play a role in these debates in part through (1) establishing and elaborating the refugee as a category of humanitarian governance (and of personhood) and (2) articulating and consolidating an array of obligations and responsibilities across the humanitarian field. The longevity of Palestinian displacement and the concomitant longevity of the assistance apparatus make it possible to trace these processes over time.
Palestinian Refugees and Extended Displacement
The more than five million Palestinian refugees (counting only those who are registered with the United Nations [UN] Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees; UNRWA) constitute one of the world’s largest and longest-lasting refugee populations. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes and dispossessed of their property in the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. Displacement extended over multiple years, beginning as fighting broke out in Palestine ahead of the British departure, intensifying after the May 1948 declaration of the state of Israel and the entrance of surrounding Arab countries into the failed fight to defend Palestine, and continuing for several years as Israel carried out a process of expelling Palestinians from parts of the country.2 Later conflicts have produced additional displacement. Never having been permitted to return to their homes, the Palestinian refugee population has persisted through generations and increased significantly in size.
Both longevity and size create resource challenges for UNRWA, the UN agency that was established in 1950 to provide aid to refugees across five “fields” of displacement: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.3,4 But there were significant resource constraints even in the first years after displacement, which made management of the relief rolls a central part of UNRWA practice from the beginning and also key to the work of the volunteer agencies that delivered UN-provided aid before the agency was created. As Palestinian displacement has continued over nearly 70 years, the humanitarian apparatus has changed significantly. The expansive aid basket that marked the first years of displacement (and which is brought back for particular crises) has been replaced with a system that is less comprehensive and more focused on chronic and structural needs (education and health care are at the center). The political import of humanitarian aid has always been a subject of debate among Palestinians and outside observers. These debates have continued and even intensified over time.
As the humanitarian assistance regime was codified, a formal division of jurisdiction was established. UNRWA (with assistance from other agencies at times) was responsible for the provision of aid. Host countries were responsible for administration and security in the camps. Humanitarian governance has always been a shared endeavor, and refugees have never been simply passive recipients of commands from either humanitarians or governments. They have made demands, refused policies and procedures that they deemed to be deleterious to their community, and sometimes simply ignored or evaded rules and regulations. Furthermore, the three broad categories of actors in the humanitarian dynamic—humanitarian agencies and personnel, host governments, and refugees—frequently overlap in practice. Notably, the vast majority of humanitarian workers who provide aid to Palestinian refugees are themselves Palestinian refugees.
Corruption Makes Refugees
The anthropological literature on humanitarianism has highlighted how these systems of aid and protection impose significant limits on recipients (Fassin 2005; Malkki 1996). To gain recognition as a “victim,” as an object worthy of humanitarian concern, refugees (and other persons in need) are often required to appear as apolitical suffering subjects (Fassin and D’Halluin 2005; Feldman 2009). The humanitarian search for vulnerability can, in fact, make certain categories of persons—especially adult males—more vulnerable to exclusion from humanitarian recognition (Kotef 2010; Mikdashi 2014; Ticktin 2011). They may also be more likely to be accused of fraud as they make their way through gatekeeping mechanisms. Accusations of corruption contribute to what many people identify as humanitarianism’s “dehumanizing” effects, but this is not their only effect vis-à-vis the refugee category. Suspicions of corruption also have the perhaps ironic effect of ascribing to refugees a more complex personhood than that with which the humanitarian system can generally engage. Instead of viewing refugees as passive sufferers and recipients, concerns about corruption develop and deploy a sense of refugees as also conniving and duplicitous. Although these may not be positive attributes, they are undeniably human ones.
The archival and ethnographic record is replete with expressions of concern that refugees will lie and cheat.5 They are seen as likely to do these things not because they are bad people but because their circumstances are both precarious and boring (there is a humanitarian consensus that idleness leads to no good). If ascriptions of humanitarian need are predicated on the perceived incapacity of refugees to care for themselves, refugee corruption highlights another perceived incapacity: the incapacity to be wholly moral agents.6 Indeed, to become a refugee is to lose, by dint of circumstance, some of the capacity for moral action that people had before displacement. In addition to providing basic means of survival, humanitarian governance must also manage the moral existence of the recipient population.7 Some of this management entails reeducating refugees in morality, but a good portion of it involves the humanitarian taking-up of moral decision making on behalf of refugees. This latter process requires disciplinary actions, undertaken not as punishment but as a means of compelling ethical action.
The management of fraud on the ration rolls brings these concerns to the fore. Such fraud was of great concern to the agencies that first supplied UN-provided aid to refugees—the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS), and the American Friends Service Committee—and it has been one of the central concerns of UNRWA from its establishment. Limited resources meant that there were strict ceilings on the number of ration recipients in each area of operation. Once that ceiling was reached, additional eligible persons could not be added to the lists. UNRWA viewed it as a humanitarian imperative to purge the rolls. Refugees, however, viewed maintaining a presence on the rolls, even in contradiction to the official rules, as a vital humanitarian matter. Their primary concern was meeting their own needs, not satisfying the regulations of humanitarian aid groups. The mechanisms necessary to clean up the rolls were viewed as ethically problematic by humanitarian actors themselves (Feldman 2007a, 2007b). But getting the rolls right was deemed to be the more fundamental imperative. Given the stakes, it is not surprising that managing the rolls brought humanitarians, refugees, and host governments into regular conflict.
Direct appeals to refugees to aid in these efforts illuminate how humanitarian agencies approached these people not just as private recipients of aid but as, at least partly, public participants in the humanitarian system. In a biweekly newsletter that the LRCS produced for its aid recipients, the associate director of operations in Syria penned a letter to refugees. He urged them to appreciate the efforts of the LRCS and underscored the importance of their cooperation in making the relief operation a success. He acknowledged that, even as the Red Cross tried to “exercise its activity with the maximum efficiency possible,” it could never be perfect. And, he said, refugees had a role to play in improving the work: “The refugees can help the Red Cross to achieve perfection by making helpful comments and suggestions provided they are well-considered and constructive. Systematic criticism and permanent discontentment are in general destructive and cannot contribute, either morally or materially, to ameliorate a situation.”8 The associate director also chastised refugees for subterfuge: “True declarations will also greatly help our organisation. We have lost considerable time, encountered many difficulties simply because some refugees were not honest and did not give the right number of the members of their family and failed to notify us of deaths and births occurring, to the detriment of their interests and our efforts.” This insistence that refugee interests and humanitarian efforts are identical, that refugees share a public responsibility, even if they do not realize it, is a thread that runs through much humanitarian communication with Palestinians. A central object of humanitarian governance has been to convince refugees of this alignment and to have them act accordingly.
The many, and frequently unsuccessful, efforts by UNRWA to make sure that only those whom it deemed bona fide refugees appeared on the rolls indicate how challenging this aim was and underscore the related necessity for humanitarian actors to take charge of ethical decision making among refugees. Because UNRWA was unable to rely solely on persuasion, investigation was a key mechanism for ethical enactment. In 1954, the chief district officer of the Gaza field reported to UNRWA headquarters on the state of investigations of the ration rolls. The investigation system in Gaza was multipronged, responding to false registration, receipt of rations under a false name, and maintenance on the rolls of properly registered persons who were no longer eligible (due to death, movement, or income). It involved both investigations that began with “reports gathered from the camp residents, who, because of family troubles and feuds volunteer information”9 and periodic identity checks during ration distribution. Just as ration fraud involved multiple actors, so too did efforts to combat it.
Central to this policing were efforts to enlist mukhtars, who were themselves corrupt when they vouched for noneligible persons, to instead act against ration fraud.10 The chief district officer reported that agreement had been reached with the Egyptian administrators of Gaza to have them “exert considerable pressure on Mukhtars and Sheikhs [village and tribal leaders]” to “submit lists of false registrations from their particular villages.” This process had already begun with one village and had yielded 75 names. He also reported on a plan for cooperation in policing deaths. Egyptian authorities agreed to supply seven guards if UNRWA would supply eight to cover the 15 cemeteries in the Gaza Strip. These guards would “prevent secret burials and check the death certificates issued by the Public Health Dept.” Because UNRWA believed that approximately 50% of deaths were being registered under false names, this procedure could make a considerable difference. Informing, coercion, and surveillance were at the center of what the chief district officer viewed as the most effective system for managing fraud, and they were therefore also at the center of the relationship between humanitarian actors and refugees.
Egyptian officials supported this practice, but the Syrian government expressed concern about using informing in ration rolls management.11 In a 1962 letter to UNRWA, the director of the Syrian government’s refugee agency (PARI) commented that some refugees “have lately resorted to the habit of intriguing against other fellow refugees by sending information to UNRWA about the income of such refugees, with the bad intention of persuading the Agency to stop the issue of their rations. They resort to such means to avenge themselves or because of personal and family disputes and dissensions.”12 This practice was disturbing to PARI, and the letter went on to assert the conviction that UNRWA officials would agree that it was contrary to the common good, contrary to the rules, and “might lead to the spread of corruptness among the refugee circles.” The potential corruption to which the PARI official referred was both the subversion of the proper workings of the humanitarian system and the degradation of moral character among those who could be encouraged to act in this way.
The PARI official expressed concern that a mechanism intended to fight one form of corruption could lead to another. Here he seemed to reference the idea of mutual care and compassion as a good to be nurtured by humanitarian practice. He also worried about the consequences from either “the social or the security aspects,” referencing the common host government worry about disrupting stability. He further argued that the agency should actively discourage the practice and should disregard any information obtained this way. “By merely admitting to consider and investigate such pieces of information, we might encourage others to follow that way.”13 No response from UNRWA is included in the file, but if the Gaza director’s attitude was indicative of an agency position, UNRWA may not have shared this Syrian concern. Matters of care and security were not irrelevant to UNRWA, but controlling the rolls was seen as more fundamental and was also believed to contribute to these other goals.
Managing the rolls was a challenge in every field, but Jordan was viewed by UNRWA as the most difficult one. The large number of Palestinians in the country, most of whom were granted Jordanian citizenship in 1954, also meant that the government paid particular attention to security problems arising from their presence. Attempts by UNRWA to cleanse the rolls through investigations were inevitably met with resistance by refugees, and the Jordanian government, seeking to stave off unrest, regularly insisted that the process be halted. In one such instance, in September 1953, UNRWA officials restarted investigations in the Bethlehem area after a 10-month suspension. UNRWA’s Jordan representative reported that, despite “considerable opposition” (presumably from refugees) in this area as well as in Hebron and Jericho, the agency had been able to carry out investigations—until the Jordanian government intervened and requested a halt.14 He described a conversation with the minister of foreign affairs that spelled out the reasons for the halt:
His Government was faced with a public security problem of grave proportions and it was almost miraculous that no serious trouble from the refugees had occurred up to now. He felt that to continue to conduct our investigations on the present lines might precipitate an explosion which must be dealt with by the Jordan government at which UNRWA would be a mere spectator! He contented [sic] that even if there were a number of ineligibles on the rations lists, that number was not large, and that any “witchhunt” to eliminate them would precipitate a crisis out of all proportion to the benefits accruing.15
That things were not in fact settled is made clear in the ongoing correspondence on this problem over the years. In its efforts to solicit greater government assistance, UNRWA linked cleansing the rolls to refugee concerns for aid expansion. In 1964, UNRWA’s Jordan director commented in a letter to the Jordanian minister of development and reconstruction that “it should be possible to issue rations to the children in question within the existing ration ceiling if the Jordan Government will extend to the Agency its full and effective cooperation in eliminating unreported deaths and absences, false and duplicate registrations, and families (including employees of the Jordan Government) who are in receipt of sufficient income to support themselves.”17 Insisting on the “hardship and suffering which the continuing existence of these inaccuracies must cause to many eligible refugees who are genuinely in need of assistance,” UNRWA officials asserted that they were “unable to accept the suggestion that the Agency’s investigations should be restricted.” The letter went on to say that the agency hoped to “count on the cooperation of the Government in explaining the true situation to the refugees and in convincing them that these investigations, far from causing harm and injury, are in fact of positive benefit to the genuinely deserving members of the refugee community in Jordan.” The effort to maintain positive relations kept the agency’s language diplomatic, but underlying this and many other such communications was a concern that the Jordanian government was at least complicit in corruption by interfering with its management.
The refusal of refugees to report deaths and the failure of the Jordanian government to capture these occurrences were sources of ongoing frustration. In 1973, UNRWA lamented the number of aid-eligible children who could not be added to the rolls and reproached the Jordanian government for contributing to its “inability to obtain information which would make possible the redistribution of rations from absent and non-needy refugees.”18 The letter went on to detail the problem with the dead: “The number of deaths reported in Jordan to the Agency during the past six years has averaged less than 2.0 per thousand. This figure is absurd in the light of normal vital statistics, and the number of unreported dead alone which have accumulated on the Agency’s records over the longer period before 1967 must amount to tens of thousands.” If the problem was not addressed, the missive indicated, it would become increasingly difficult to get enough donations to provide rations at all.19 Furthermore, “the Agency has a responsibility to the international community to ensure that the rations provided for needy refugees are distributed to those for whom they are intended.” In referencing the international community, the agency underscored the potentially punitive capacity of donors to influence the system.
That the problem continued and was not limited to Jordan is made clear in correspondence in 1987. By this point, the basic ration system had been discontinued. Only those refugees who qualified as “special hardship cases” received rations. But resource limits remained. Writing to the directors of each of UNRWA’s fields in 1987 about the number of registered refugees 80 years of age or older, the chief of the relief division remarked: “Once more these lists are appalling and I cannot believe that we have so many refugees alive of such great ages. The record holder lives in Syria and was born in 1819!”20 In a follow-up letter, he described how “a total of 4,887 refugees are aged 100 years and above. The four oldest refugees are 187 years old. This is of course ridiculous and we must rectify our rolls.”21 As such expressions of frustration confirm, the nexus of fraud and response had the effect of also shaping the views that the various actors in the humanitarian system had of each other.
Ration Sales as a Site of Humanitarian Governance
Concern about fraud on the ration rolls was about who was getting access to rations—whether they were needy and whether they were eligible (not identical categories). Humanitarian actors were also concerned about whether people were putting their rations to proper use. UNRWA officials acknowledged that the rations provided by the agency were never enough. The 1959 annual report stated that “the basic ration provided by the Agency has been virtually unchanged since 1951. It is generally agreed to be inadequate as a diet.”22 The agency noted that, even in the very early years of expansive provisions, refugees were rarely able to live on aid alone. As the LRCS turned over its operations to UNRWA in 1950, an LRCS employee reflected: “They [refugees] know that they need salt to prepare bread from flour and wood to bake it, they also need onions to cook the beans…. They have either to sell part of their rations in order to buy salt and onions and run the risk of starvation before they receive their next allocation, or endeavor to get more rations. The refugees are the same everywhere—they are not to blame.”23 But even as humanitarian actors recognized that a certain amount of fraud was necessary for survival, they continued to view a full-fledged market in rations as unacceptable.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank in June 1967 led to a second wave of Palestinian displacement, as refugees and newly displaced persons crossed the Jordan River to the East Bank. This displacement returned many people to a state of acute need for rations, and it disrupted and then reorganized networks that had built up over the years to move rations into the marketplace. As early as July 1967, a UNRWA official reported that a larger number of the refugees to Jericho had been residing in Amman than UNRWA had been aware of and that Jericho merchants had been collecting their rations. With a system in place in the Wihdat camp in Amman that required each West Bank family receiving rations to present identification, these merchants were unable to collect the rations directly. But, the official indicated, “merchants are returning the cards to their rightful owners in order to receive this month’s issue,”24 with the plan to turn them over for sale afterward. To put a stop to this commercial activity, he proposed expanding the identification system to all ration distribution—including distribution to East Bank refugees—noting that government cooperation, especially in the form of policing, would be needed.
This proposal was accepted by UNRWA headquarters, and at the end of August the agency notified the Jordanian government of the decision. The policy was implemented throughout the country, and there were initially few problems. But in February 1968, refugees in the Karameh refugee camp in the Jordan Valley refused to collect their rations, leading to a “tense situation and mass meeting” according to the Jordanian government.25 The identification requirement was the cause of the strike. This circumstance alarmed the Jordanian government (and it did not please UNRWA), which requested that the agency respond to this “ominous situation” by continuing rations distribution “in the manner hitherto adopted.” The initial reaction of UNRWA officials on the ground was to “let matters ride in the hope that the opposition would peter out (as had happened on previous occasions when the refugees have gone on strike against receiving rations).”26
As UNRWA and the government squared off over how to proceed (and the correspondence indicates that a fair degree of offense was taken, especially on the part of government ministers), both spoke in the name of the refugees. The government referred to “the hardships and miseries that were brought about as a result of the recent Israeli armed invasion against Jordan” and argued that it was “inadvisable to carry out such an operation among the masses of desperate refugees, many of whom have been evicted twice within less than two decades, a time when the only international help left to them amounts a little more than a loaf of bread.”27 UNRWA, for its part, indicated that the system put “the distribution of rations on a much more equitable and defensible basis than before and this is undoubtedly in the interest of the refugees themselves.”28 Embedded in these competing claims to speak (and act) on behalf of refugees are competing arguments about what actions lie at the heart of humanitarian intervention. In the end, UNRWA agreed to a temporary halt to the identification requirement in Karameh, with assurances (that it did not wholly trust) from the government that the halt would indeed be temporary and would not be allowed to undermine the larger control process.29
With respect to the larger matter of curtailing merchant access to rations, the government did step up its assistance. In April, it issued an order that police should “prohibit merchants to draw near the distribution centers in towns or camps to purchase cards or rations.”30 The following month, the director of UNRWA operations in Jordan reported that the government was indeed providing strong support and that, nonetheless, merchant efforts to acquire these goods continued: “the merchants continue to try to ‘rear their ugly heads’ and in order to suppress them constant vigilance is required.”31 He went on to describe in some detail efforts to circumvent policing:
That merchants are alive to our action is clear and to illustrate their pertinacity, I would relate the obviously careful preparation they set up in Jerash [camp]. Refugees apparently loaded flour in a normal way on to donkeys at the distribution centre. These donkeys then departed and deposited their loads in a tent. From the tent the flour was loaded onto carts which proceeded out of the camp and went round the corner out of sight where the flour on the carts was reloaded onto trucks. This was discovered by one of our personnel who happened to be visiting the camp at the time which illustrates also the importance of continuous camp inspection at all levels.
Accusation Names Obligations
Aid providers are not the only ones who make corruption accusations in humanitarian settings. Certainly in the Palestinian instance, and by no means only in this case, refugees also make judgments about the actions and behaviors of others and identify their critique as being about corruption. Defending humanitarian personnel against such charges, Anis Nasr, a Palestinian refugee employee of the LRCS, acknowledged that many of the things that refugees demanded were reasonable, even the “minimum of their normal requirements,”32 but also stressed that employees could only perform the mission that they were given. Refugee-humanitarian workers thus found themselves criticized “through no fault of their own.” Nasr attributed the refugee tendency to accusation partly to the same idleness and frustration that sometimes led them to corruption. As displacement stretched on with no return in sight,
his morale dropped, and sitting idle all day he had to think. Thoughts of idle people are directed more towards evil than good. He must do something about it, and he did, by resuming his attacks on the local staff with changed tactics. The new method was in the form of an anonymous letter addressed to the administration, accusing his fellow refugee of mal-administration, irregularities and misconduct.
In this case, the accusations of corruption may have been easily dismissed, but such charges—especially of favoritism and misdirection of resources—have been a persistent part of the humanitarian dynamic, and they are not always (deemed) false. Corruption accusations are a site of humanitarian governance and refugee regulation. But they are not only that. Corruption accusations are also a crucial mechanism through which the terms of humanitarian obligations get worked out. In naming certain actions, policies, and procedures as unacceptable, these accusations are a form of definition in the negative. Humanitarianism is not and must not be fraudulent, duplicitous, or unfair. Accusations also convey an argument about what humanitarianism is and must be: adequate and responsive to people’s needs and not deleterious to their rights. Although few humanitarian actors would disagree with the attributes called nonhumanitarian, the boundaries of positive obligations are highly contested.
When they talk about humanitarian obligations, Palestinian refugees address not only failings in humanitarian implementation but a larger question about whether humanitarian assistance is itself in fundamental conflict with their aspirations. Collected in UNRWA’s archive are numerous petitions and complaints from individuals and groups of refugees, press accounts of protests in the camps, and pamphlets by Palestinian political organizations exhorting camp residents to action. These exhortations frequently identify the agency as part of a plot to “liquidate” Palestinian claims. Responding to the firing of some UNRWA teachers for engaging in political activity, “The Committee for Defending the Returnees” issued a declaration that identified services as a means through which the agency threatened refugees.33 It threatened them “in their salaries, in their clothes and shelter to deprive them from the simplest human right,” freedom of thought, opinion, and action. Addressing camp residents, the declaration asked: “Has the Agency supplied the needs of the returnees, from food, education and medical care? Has she allowed them at least to live cooperating and helping each other or has she intrigued against them to disunite them and to weaken them?” The declaration raised the possibility that the humanitarian enterprise itself might be duplicitous, a corruption of the international obligation to support Palestinian rights.
Even as these pamphlets name UNRWA as a political enemy of the Palestinians, the demands in these pamphlets almost always also include specific requests for improvements in humanitarian services. A group called “Arab Palestinian Youth in Lebanon” declared that “the U.N. who origin cause in the disaster cannot be considered the suitable organization to solve the Palestine problem” and that “the Relief Agency is a danger threatening their case.”34 It then went on to list more than 50 specific demands for improvements in humanitarian services, including increasing access to health care, limiting class sizes, increasing the calories in ration allotments, replacing international staff with Palestinians, and abolishing the income scale that governed ration provision. Whatever judgment refugees might make about humanitarianism, it could not be wholly rejected. This fact underscores that, to the extent that humanitarianism is compromised action, these compromises are required not only of humanitarian workers but of refugees themselves.
Evaluating UNRWA, people express a range of opinions that reflect the contention around this institution. Some people say that the very existence of UNRWA is part of an effort to undermine a political solution to the Palestinian problem. As one person told me, “UNRWA has a strategy that it follows. In the beginning—this is my opinion—UNRWA … used to give to the people too generously … to encourage people to leave their homeland. And unfortunately people ran after these things—some of them.” Other people insist that UNRWA’s existence is an acknowledgment of Palestinian political claims and of the responsibility of the international community to address them. As an ex-Gazan who is also a UNRWA employee put it, “UNRWA does not represent a humanitarian service given to refugees. The services given to us are our right. Our problem is created by the international community and they are responsible for solving it. UNRWA has a political dimension, rather than a humanitarian one.” A resident of Dheisheh camp in the West Bank echoed these sentiments: “The sack of flour which we take from UNRWA—or we used to take from UNRWA—was something political to me. It was not humanitarian.” These debates about UNRWA and humanitarianism have been ongoing since the first years after 1948. Putting humanitarianism in question (Barnett and Weiss 2008) is a key part of Palestinian politics through which Palestinians have addressed the international community, host countries, and each other.
A Changing Rations System and the Question of Humanitarian Responsibility
Just as rations eligibility and provision were sites for evaluations of refugee character and potential corruption, so too have they been venues for arguments about humanitarian obligations. Reductions in ration allotments were especially charged in this regard. For the first decades after displacement, both in 1948 and after the second displacement of 1967, rations were vital to refugee survival, even if they were never sufficient for that survival. Over time, as more people found employment (in UNRWA, in host countries, and abroad), their material significance receded, even as their symbolic and political importance remained. Income scales were one response to this change. These provided for a stepped reduction in rations allotment, with rations eventually withdrawn when family income crossed the determined threshold. Eventually, UNRWA began to consider ending the basic rations program altogether. When, in the late 1970s, financial exigencies led to a reduction in goods provided to rations recipients, UNRWA officials determined that this reduction “neither affects adversely the nutritional state of most ration recipients nor strikes alarm in the refugee community, despite occasional outcries by mukhtars.”35 Noting that the ration allotment was, at that point, 836 calories per person per day and that an average family of six was likely getting only two or three portions (due to income phase out), it seemed that rations were making little contribution to the family diet. Recognizing the fact that some people did have extraordinary need, UNRWA introduced a new category of special hardship cases who were targeted for additional rations: 1,600 calories per day, with a goal to increase that to 1,879 calories per day. When the program began in January 1980, it was successfully implemented in Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The Syrian government refused the program, and the Lebanon field office recommended against implementation there because of anticipated opposition from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
And refugees, often through the mukhtars who were local leaders, complained about rations reductions. These complaints linked need and right, a persistent feature of refugee discourse and action vis-à-vis UNRWA. In a 1981 petition objecting to the significant curtailment in rations provision, a mukhtar from the Balata refugee camp near Nablus identified this service change as a violation of rights: “Where is humanity and what they call Human Rights? The rights that were granted to them by the United Nations in-lieu-of their usurped lands? Where is justice? Where is democracy? Where is the Human Rights that protect all the refugees … women, children, and widows who are left without rations and on the verge of extinction.”36 The petition went on to ask for both a restoration of rations and support for their “many usurped rights—rights which were recognized unanimously by the United Nations.” In charging UNRWA with failing in its obligations, refugees clearly name a humanitarian obligation to protect their rights and not just their needs. The extent to which such responsibility should be acknowledged by humanitarian actors is a subject of ongoing contention both within the agency and in relations between the agency and refugees, host countries, and the wider international community. But the claim has not been simply dismissed.
At the same time, humanitarians insist on a primary obligation to identify and respond to the greatest needs. Ration reductions continued, and officials began to advocate more forcefully for ending the basic rations program. The chief of the relief division argued that it “must be eliminated” in order to enable relief to go to “the really needy sectors of the population.” He identified two groups “which are particularly disadvantaged, the disabled and the special hardship cases, and for whom the Agency does very little.”37 Recognizing both the financial savings that such a change would produce and the lack of real need for the program, the deputy commissioner-general noted a number of obstacles. Many donors to UNRWA made in-kind food contributions, using the rations program as a means to deal with their own surplus food, and had been resistant to changing to cash donations. There would be opposition from Jordan, Syria, and the PLO, “not on grounds of humanitarian sympathy for suffering refugees, but on political grounds and the desire to maintain the image of UNRWA much as it was in the ‘50s.”38 As the UNRWA cabinet prepared to deliberate on the matter, a memo from the relief services department underscored that “the sole justification for continuing to subsidize a majority of refugee families by means of the basic ration programme is political: the programme makes no economic sense for people whose most urgent unsatisfied need is communal.”39 Palestinians may have agreed that their most urgent need was for national restoration, but they disagreed with the argument that maintaining the rations program was irrelevant to that demand.
In the end, the change was enabled by exigencies on the ground. The program was suspended in September 1982 to devote resources to refugee victims of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it was never restarted, despite UN General Assembly requests, “because sufficient contributions have not been forthcoming.”40 This change was met with objection: “complaints and protests continually being made by individual refugees, their representatives and the host Governments regarding the non-resumption of the basic ration.”41 But it was never resumed. The introduction of the special hardship case category—which is now being replaced by a social safety net program that uses the categories of absolute and abject poverty—required the development of new criteria for eligibility and new mechanisms for determining whether people met those criteria.42 There was a limit to the number of persons or families allowed to be recognized as special hardship cases, which means that eligibility for this status was based on not just people’s absolute condition but their condition relative to other refugees.
The mechanisms for determining people’s conditions have been contentious and highlight another venue in which the variety of actors within the humanitarian world view each other with suspicion and charge each other with different sorts of corruption. In this case, humanitarian workers sometimes view refugees as (at best) failing to appreciate the principles of humanitarian action or (at worst) being selfish and even duplicitous in their efforts to secure access to resources at the expense of their more needy neighbors. Also, refugees sometimes view humanitarian workers and policy makers as either personally corrupt (allowing wasta [connections] to play a central role in decisions) or as systemically demeaning (using investigation procedures that require people to trade their dignity for assistance). The comment made to me by a resident of the Burj al Barajneh refugee camp reflects widespread views among refugees: “We, all the Palestinians, as soon as you hear the word UNRWA it means fasad [corruption]. … It means a corrupt employee, a more corrupt supervisor and higher supervisor is even more and more corrupt. … That is its definition and meaning for us.” The charge that wasta governs aid distribution is classically recognizable as a charge of corruption, and it is part of a broad corruption lexicon that structures people’s judgments of each other and of humanitarian practice.
UNRWA officials and beneficiaries evaluate the procedures for special hardship case determination quite differently. When I interviewed a chief area officer in Lebanon (a refugee himself), he expressed considerable frustration about how the refugee population dealt with the agency and its procedures. He explained that the community feels that the agency is obligated to cover all of its needs but that the agency’s budget is highly restricted. One of the challenges that UNRWA faces, he told me, was how to convince people of these limited resources and that they therefore might not be eligible for special hardship status, because someone else in the community might be in more need. From his perspective, the priority was to help the most vulnerable, and others–even those with legitimate needs—should recognize the validity of these distinctions.
Refugees certainly recognize that there are different needs in the community, although what I heard from many people in the course of my research is that resources do not necessarily go to those most in need but rather to those who are most connected (whether those connections are to UNRWA personnel or to political factions). So refugees often reject UNRWA’s assertion that they are simply determining who is most in need. Apart from questions of personal corruption, many refugees also question the grounds on which determinations of need are officially made. People repeatedly described their frustrations with the home inspections that are part of this determination. Any material object that people have in their houses—a television, satellite dish, or refrigerator—could keep them out of the category of the truly needy. But refugees argue that need should not be measured this way. They believe quite strongly that even the most abject—to use UNRWA’s new vocabulary—deserve something more than bare survival. When refugees argue that the terms in which they are being evaluated for aid are wrong, they are making a charge that policies and procedures are being developed and deployed in a way that works contrary to the requirements of humanitarian obligation. The register may be personal, rather than nationalist, but it is not unconnected to refugees’ charges that the humanitarian system may work against Palestinian aspirations (Feldman 2017).
Suspicion Defines Humanitarianism
Despite the ubiquity of humanitarian language, action, and sentiment in our current world, there has been no consensus on the precise definition of humanitarianism. Many definitions have been offered by scholars, practitioners, and recipients, and they often clash. Humanitarian obligations, jurisdiction, limits, and even actors remain unsettled and often hotly contested. Not only does humanitarianism reach across multiple domains—framing discourse and sentiment, a component of international law and convention—its practitioners and recipients have long been engaged in active debate about which forms of action are truly humanitarian and which binding principles are necessary to qualify one’s practice and motives as genuinely humanitarian. Some humanitarian organizations reject the idea that human rights or development should be incorporated into the field.43 Others see the provision of relief without rights or attention to structural issues as so minimal as to fall below the threshold requirements of real care for others. As Western humanitarian organizations view the expanding humanitarian universe with concern, they worry that those whom they identify as “new” actors (mainly from the Global South) will not abide by the principles of neutrality and impartiality accepted by the “humanitarian club” (Barnett and Walker 2015), and some of these other actors point out the paternalist, even imperialist, attitudes of Western agencies. These sorts of discussions do not occur only among policy makers and central offices. They are also articulated in the field—a space where recipient voices and experiences have greater weight.
I have focused on how suspicions about motives and probity, often articulated through the language of corruption, are deployed in these contests over definition. Suspicion is not the only ground for debates about definition, but it has been a consistent one. It has also structured the ways refugees become objects of humanitarian governance. As private persons endowed with a kind of public responsibility—often against their will and certainly without their choice—refugee behavior must be monitored for fraud, duplicity, and misuse. Humanitarians must take on responsibility not only for refugees’ physical survival and basic needs but also for their morality, and refugees are not passive recipients of such charges but make plenty of charges of their own. Circulating accusations of corruption are a fertile ground for making claims about obligations. The charges that Palestinian refugees sometimes make about the true purpose of humanitarian aid take the question of definition to a more fundamental level. Is humanitarianism, in fact, a force for good in the world?
Corruption accusations are a means through which different actors define what humanitarianism should be. Such accusations highlight certain actions, policies, and procedures as not properly humanitarian, as an abuse of one’s position as either aid provider or recipient, and in so doing, accusation names humanitarian obligations. These obligations are not defined in only negative terms; frequently, an alternative vision is offered. Humanitarians are called upon to support refugees’ rights and not just their needs. Refugees, for their part, are asked to recognize systematic criteria and not just personal exigency. Both parties demand an evaluation of people and personnel within the limits of their missions and their capacities. Because these arguments are embedded in immediate action, they have immediate consequences of various kinds. Even when these charges do not succeed in changing the shape of “proper” humanitarian action, they directly impact the interactions and relations among its participants. Circulating concerns about corruption are part of why humanitarian relations of care are also always relations of suspicion.
Notes
Ilana Feldman is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and History and in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University (2110 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA [[email protected]]).
1. Cris Shore and Dieter Haller (2005) suggest that policy maker discourse about corruption in these terms reduces the problem to one of “rotten apples” (2). Socioscientific investigations of these issues generally recognize the systemic features.
2. The causes of Palestinian departure have been much explored in the historiography on Israel-Palestine, most famously by Benny Morris (1987).
4. Until 1967, the West Bank was part of Jordan, and until 1952, UNRWA also operated in Israel.
5. There is a perhaps ironic similarity to the suspicious state that David Nugent describes, in which Peruvian state authorities viewed themselves as “surrounded by a veritable sea of subversives” (Nugent 2018).
6. This attribution of amorality, if not immorality, to impoverished people is not limited to Palestinians or to refugees. See Ansell (2018), in this volume of Current Anthropology.
7. This process is part of a broader terrain of hierarchies, inequities, and paternalism that is part of humanitarian practice (Fassin 2010; Feldman 2016; Redfield 2012).
8. International Federation of Red Cross Societies archives, A0403-2 19740, publications, “A word from Dr. Depage,” Al Aghathat, July 15, 1949:2.
9. UNRWA archives [UA], inactive files, box 1 E 6B, from chief district officer, Gaza, to acting director, UNRWA HQ, June 24, 1954.
10. American Friends Service Committee workers in Gaza reported that mukhtars “will sell their signatures on virtually every occasion, shaking the refugees down if a complaint is to be submitted with their confirmation, if the mukhtar is to confirm the membership of a certain family in his village, confirming a certain number of children, etc, etc. What is sold for truth can equally be sold for falsehood, and that is frequently the practice it appears” (American Friends Service Committee archives, #41 FS sect Palestine, letter from Howard Wriggins to Colin Bell, February 18, 1949).
11. On Egyptian reliance on informing in its own governing work, see Feldman 2015.
12. UA, RE 7 RE 210 (S) part 1, from director of PARI, to director of UNRWA affairs, Damascus, November 19, 1962.
13. He also noted the case of a particular family that had lost rations as a result of such informing and suggested that this measure be reversed (it is possible that the letter was prompted by this case).
14. UA, inactive files, box 11, file J.16, investigations–1954, letter from W. T. Clark (acting UNRWA representative, Jordan) to acting director, UNRWA HQ, Beirut, September 22, 1953.
15. UA, inactive files, box 11, file J.16, investigations–1954, letter from W. T. Clark (acting UNRWA representative, Jordan) to acting director, UNRWA HQ, Beirut, October 14, 1953.
16. UA, inactive files, box 11, file J.16, investigations–1954, Leslie Carver (acting director). Note for record, discussions with foreign minister of Jordan on December 20, 1954, December 21, 1954.
17. UNRWA box RE 66, RE 500, part 3, June 30, 1964.
18. UA box RE 6 RE 210(J) part 5, letter, September 26, 1973.
19. Except for the salaries of senior personnel, UNRWA is funded entirely on a voluntary basis by UN member nations.
20. UA box RE 68 RE 210, part 2, from chief, Relief Division, to directors of UNRWA fields, February 19, 1987.
21. UA box RE 68 RE 210, part 2, from chief, Relief Division, to directors of UNRWA fields, March 3, 1987.
22. UNRWA, Annual report 1959. Aid given to destitute nonrefugees in Gaza was even less adequate: “the regular monthly issues of flour, butter, cheese and milk given by the Egyptian and United States (through CARE) Governments provide only a basic 1,050 calories per person per day (compared to the Agency’s basic provision of 1,500 to refugees in summer)” (UNRWA, Special report of the director concerning other claimants for relief. A/2978/Add.1, 1955).
23. IFRC, A0403-2 19740, personal experiences, Anis Nasr, assistant field director, Lebanon, March 29, 1950.
24. UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 1, from field operations officer, Jordan, to director of UNRWA affairs, Jordan, July 28, 1967.
25. UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 1, text of memo from Jordanian minister of foreign affairs in memo from UNRWA commissioner general to UN under-secretary general for special political affairs (Bunche) to UNRWA commissioner general (Michelmore) l, February 6, 1968.
26. UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 1, from commissioner general (Michelmore) to UN under-secretary for special political affairs (Bunche), February 8, 1968.
27. UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 1, from UNRWA commissioner general to UN under-secretary general for special political affairs (Bunche) to UNRWA commissioner general (Michelmore) l, February 6, 1968.
28. UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 1, suggested draft reply to Jordan government memo, nd.
29. The particular question of Karameh shortly become moot. After the battle of Karameh in March 1968, when Israeli forces targeted PLO fighters in the town and camp, the refugee camps in the Jordan valley were closed, and refugees moved elsewhere. UNRWA reports on identification checks of people from the camp now living elsewhere indicated no problems in the following months, suggesting to officials that “the difficulties we encountered at Karameh did not come from the rank and file of the refugee community” (UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 2, from commissioner general [Michelmore] to UN under-secretary for special political affairs [Bunche], April 24, 1968).
30. UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 2. Order from Jordanian Ministry of Development and Reconstruction to director of public security, April 3, 1968.
31. UA RE 8 RE 210/5, part 2, from director of UNRWA affairs to deputy commissioner general, May 18, 1968.
32. IFRC, A0403-2 19740, personal experiences, Anis Nasr, assistant field director, Lebanon, March 29, 1950.
33. UA box RE 3 RE 150 part 1, translation: “Declaration from the Committee for Defending the Returnees,” February 17, 1960.
34. UA box RE 3 RE 150 part 1, “The expellees in Lebanon: their resolution and demands,” Badge of the Palestine Arab Youth in Lebanon, January 1, 1960. The pamphlet also complained that UNRWA was acting like a government: “It is regrettable that the emigrants see the Relief Agency behave as if it was a Government having a fixed aspect, enacting rules and regulations to apply to the emigrants (as if they were its subjects) [whether] they wanted it or not.”
35. UA box 4 RE 200 part 2, “The relief programme–a progress report.” Memo prepared by UNRWA director of administration and relief for UNRWA General Cabinet, May 6, 1980.
36. UA box RE 67, RE 500, petition from mukhtar of Balata camp to UNRWA commissioner general, August 6, 1981. In UNRWA’s response to the petition, budget constraints were referenced as the reason no restoration was possible.
37. UA box 4 RE 200 part 2, from chief, Relief Services Division, to director of Relief Service, January 28, 1982. He noted that UNRWA expenditure for the disabled amounted to 0.00072% of the annual budget, a number that was, he said, “nothing to be proud of.”
38. UA box 4 RE 200 part 2, from deputy commissioner-general to director of Relief Services, January 29, 1982.
39. UA box 4 RE 200 part 2, “The future of relief services,” cabinet memo 7/82.
40. UA box 4 RE 200 part 2, annex A to letter from director, Relief Services Division, to acting commissioner-general, November 20, 1985.
41. UA box 4 RE 200 part 2, annex A to letter from director, Relief Services Division, to acting commissioner-general, November 20, 1985.
42. A UNRWA report on the program in 2006 described the criteria: “They must be in economic distress with no healthy male adult between the ages of nineteen and sixty, and the total family income can not exceed two-thirds of a grade one step one of local UNRWA salary, i.e., lowest paid UNRWA area staff member with the same number of dependents, they also need to fit within one of the eight categories of eligibility criteria. The majority of special hardship case families assisted fall within three categories: the elderly (A category), female-headed households (W category) and those unable to work due to chronic illness or disability (M category)” (Hejoj and Badran 2006:22).
43. Médecins Sans Frontières pulled out of the recent “humanitarian summit” precisely because of its concern that the summit sought to remake humanitarianism into a form of development.
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