Examination of Witness (Questions 200-219)
MR ALAN
SEATTER
28 NOVEMBER 2006
Q200 Richard Burden: You talk about
addressing Israel's concern. What are you doing to address the
Palestinians' concern that somebody else is hanging on to their
money?
Mr Seatter: Getting their money
back where it belongs is what we are trying to do for the Palestinians.
If you will pardon me, Chairman, I do not accept the description
of sanctions.
Q201 Richard Burden: What are they?
Mr Seatter: If you look at the
figures that the International Monetary Fund has produced for
the actual flow of funds to meet the expenditure that the Palestinian
Authority would otherwise have to meet, that is in respect of
its employees, the teachers, doctors and other people, the flow
of funds that has come in from the international community has
been very much bigger this year than it was last year.
Q202 Richard Burden: That is not
the definition of sanctions, is it? Let me put it to you this
way. Let us say that the United States cut off diplomatic relations
with the Government of Israel and the USAID stopped giving any
money at all to Israeli government institutions but actually provided
some food parcels into Israel? Do you think Israel would regard
the United States as adopting sanctions against it?
Mr Seatter: The funds that are
coming in from the international community are going to meet the
expenditure of public services. On average, last year there was
$39 million a month coming to the Palestinian Authority.
Q203 Richard Burden: It does not
come in to the Palestinian Authority.
Mr Seatter: But it meets the same
objectives; it meets the objectives of public services, which
would otherwise have to be provided. This year the figure is $63
million, so it has gone from $39 million a month last year to
$63 million now. You are right that these funds are not going
through the accounts that are controlled by the Hamas organisation.
The reason for that is that we have to comply with anti-terrorist
financing legislation. The money has bypassed Hamas but it has
gone to its destination in much greater volume in 2006 than it
did in 2005. I think the sanctions have to be tempered by what
is really happening with the funds. The real problem is the one
you raised that Israel has withheld between $60 million and $65
million a month of Palestinian money. That has been the real problem
and not the so-called sanctions of the international community.
Q204 Richard Burden: Is it entirely
Israel that has made that decision?
Mr Seatter: Yes.
Q205 Richard Burden: If Israel is
in a position to make that decision in practice to withhold money
that does not belong to it because effectively it controls access
in and access out of Gaza, would it be accurate to say that to
all intents and purposes Gaza is still an occupied territory?
If Israel has that power, it must be exercising the power in and
out.
Mr Seatter: I think there is a
lot of legal opinion about that. We have spoken to those experts
who are working in that field. There is certainly a powerful case
to be made to say that although Israeli forces and settlers were
withdrawn at a certain moment from Gaza, the economy cannot function
as though occupation had ended. I think there is a persuasive
argument along those lines.
Q206 Richard Burden: That being the
case, and that is helpful, the states that are in occupation of
other people's land do have obligations as an occupying power.
One of the principal ones of those is to ensure that the people
of the occupied land are not subjected to humanitarian suffering
and that they have a humanitarian responsibility for the people
they occupy?
Mr Seatter: That is correct.
Q207 Richard Burden: From what you
are saying, Israel is not accepting that obligation. It is withholding
money to the Palestinian Authority and effectively it is transferring
its obligations to prevent humanitarian suffering in the occupied
territories to us, to the EU, to the international community,
and it is forcing us to say how much money we should put in when
acutely the responsibility is theirs.
Mr Seatter: There is a lot in
what you say, yes.
Q208 Richard Burden: Have we put
this point to Israel?
Mr Seatter: We have done so on
many occasions. This is not a new problem. The problem has been
going on for a long time. Even the Israeli Supreme Court has had
some judgments that say that the Fourth Geneva Convention does
apply to the occupied territory and that Israel has obligations
under those conventions not to construct settlements and, secondly,
to meet the humanitarian needs of the people who are living under
occupation. I do not know whether we would be received very sympathetically
if we then said, "Let us cut off all aid to the Palestinian
people and let Israel take responsibility for this".
Chairman: We will come to that in a minute.
That is a dilemma one is in in these situations.
Q209 Mr Davies: On the one hand,
as you say, Israel has obligations to the people in the Occupied
Territories. On the other hand, because of the second Intifada,
they had to take measures to protect their own security. All this
evil was caused by the second Intifada, was it not, that
occurred? Then we have the problem of the Hamas government being
elected and being regarded as a terrorist organisation and not
accepting the three conditions of the Quartet, which of course
would mean that they would cease to be regarded as a terrorist
organisation. The remedy is very much in Hamas's hands. You will
agree and the Israelis do not dispute that the customs revenue
belongs to the Palestinians but they are avoiding paying it over
for precisely the same reason that we are avoiding paying budget
support to Hamas pending Hamas accepting the three conditions
of the Quartet?
Mr Seatter: There is something
in what you say there.
Q210 Mr Davies: Thank you. Can I
now move on to the point you have just raised, which is news to
me? You said that in October there had been a meeting which had
discussed the idea of extending EU support to members of the civilian
police. Was that the meeting of the External Affairs Council of
the EU?
Mr Seatter: No. It was a meeting
of all Member States, which we had at technical level.
Q211 Mr Davies: It was at official
level?
Mr Seatter: Yes. Let me make one
thing clear, though. As you know, there are two funding sources
for the TIM. One is the European Community budget and the other
is the budget of Member States. We would not propose to use the
European Community budget for the civil police, but we would facilitate
the work of Member States if they wished to make funds available
to meet the needs of the police.
Q212 Mr Davies: If it were the case
that just one or two Member States would be prepared to fund the
police, would you then act as a channel for distributing that
aid or would you require a majority if not the totality of Member
States to do so before you agreed to play that role?
Mr Seatter: I think that we have
not come to that yet. Our job I think is to put proposals on the
table that would meet the objective of covering the civil police.
We can explain how that could be done. We would not want the European
Community budget to be used for that purpose.
Q213 Mr Davies: I have not asked
you that question. We agreed that it would be a matter for Member
States to make additional discrete contributions for this precise
purpose. Would you agree to act? The Commission must have some
rules or some general approach to matters like this. Would the
Commission require a certain minimum number of Member States to
provide that contribution before it agreed to act as the administrator
of those contributions? Would it wish to acquire a majority of
Member States or the totally of Member States? Take one of those?
Mr Seatter: The last point: we
would require there to be a decision of Member States and, as
you know, in this area it must be by unanimous agreement.
Q214 Mr Davies: This is my final
question. Something that strikes me as being very odd, and I think
will strike many people, taxpayers and so forth, as being very
odd is the fact that we have these two bureaucracies, both of
them splendid people. You probably could not find two better bureaucracies
in the world than the World Bank and the European Commission.
You have two of them involved in this process. You are assessing
needs, mobilising funds and some of the funds you are distributing
yourself; that is the case for Window II and Window III, as I
understand it. Window I you hand over to another bureaucracy,
the World Bank, to do it, and then the World Bank gets the money
in August and does not actually disburse it until November and
they have a free float meantime. That seems to me to be an inherently
undesirable way of running things. Would it not be much better
if one bureaucracy had the responsibility for the whole of this
process down the line and was therefore accountable to whoever
their shareholders were or, in the case of the EU, Member States,
because otherwise it is going to be impossible for anybody to
define exactly who is responsible for what and who takes the responsibility
if something goes wrong?
Mr Seatter: Our initial proposal
was for the World Bank to do all of this. When it became clear
that they could not do that in the timescale which Member States
wanted, the Commission stepped in and started delivering the allowances
to workers through Window I and Window III from the summer. The
World Bank subsequently made it clear that they would not want
to deal with Window III at all. That is why the Commission stepped
in and took that up, and that is why we have made all the payments
we have out to those people, but our initial proposal was for
the World Bank to deal with all of it.
Q215 Mr Davies: I think you misunderstood
my question. I understood the fact, and you have just repeated
what you have already told us. I am simply saying: is it not a
very undesirable situation that you should have this overlap or
this duplicity of responsibility, this lack of clarity? Would
it not be much better, if the World Bank was not prepared to do
the job which had originally been conceived for it, if the European
Commission were better adapted to do it and you had people on
the ground who were capable of taking it on—why not take
on the whole thing? It seems to me to be a muddle in the present
situation, an undesirable muddle.
Mr Seatter: I do not agree that
the lines of responsibility are confused.
Q216 Mr Davies: You have agreed with
us today that for two months payment has been lost. The European
Commission paid over money on 25 August, as you said, and disbursements
were not actually made until at least two months later, and some
have of them may not have been made today. Surely that is not
a desirable situation?
Mr Seatter: It would have been
better if it could have been done quicker.
Q217 Mr Davies: If you had been dispersing
it you would have been able to get through; as I say, you had
the money and why did not you dispense it?
Mr Seatter: We are accountable
to you anyway through your government and directly for what we
are doing here, so I do not think there is any problem about that.
I do not agree that there are confused lines of responsibility
and lack of clarity. Even two bureaucracies can work together.
We have simply divided up the operation and the lines of responsibility
are very, very clear. It has taken longer than it would have done,
not because two bureaucracies cannot work together, but because
physically on the ground it has taken time for the World Bank
to procure the equipment and the supplies for the hospitals. That
is the reason.
Q218 Mr Davies: Supposing you had
sole responsibility for delivering these programmes, all three
Windows; would you have been able to do it more rapidly?
Mr Seatter: On the medical supplies
I think we would also have had a problem, to be honest with you,
because I think that there is a real problem of procuring those
supplies and delivering them quickly, which the Bank found out.
So I would not claim that we could have done it quicker.
Q219 Chairman: There are one or two
more questions, one of which Richard Burden has dealt with partly.
The issues are the extent to which Israel's activities are restricting
the economic activity of the Palestinians. The EU has two agreements,
one with Israel and one with Palestine. I am not going to ask
you to respond because I think Richard Burden has already made
the point, but we accept that there are things that Israel are
doing which are illegal, and it does seem to us that you need
very much to put pressure on Israel. So can I ask you the second
part of the question? You have an EU/Palestinian agreement: what
is the EU doing to make that benefit the Palestinians given that
right now what is happening is their economy is collapsing?
Mr Seatter: Let me tell you what
we have done about this. We got the Israeli Government and the
Palestinian Authority to agree to set up a trilateral working
group on trade impediments and the movement of goods in and out
of the Palestinian Territories, and we had two meetings of that
in July and November 2005, and we were getting to the stage where
we were addressing precisely the problems that have been raised,
about the Paris Protocol, the restrictions on movement of goods,
the certificates that are required by different exporters and
importers, and Israel and the Palestinians working with us in
the same group had agreed to look at these problems and try to
find solutions. I do not want to have to repeat myself, but unfortunately
that work was suspended when Hamas took over the Palestinian Authority.
But we thought that that was a good way of bringing the two sides
together and getting the experts to go over the detail of this
to try and find solutions, and we were pressing Israel at that
time to recognise the EU/Palestinian agreement because up to now
they have not done that. We were pressing them to do that and
we were making progress on it, but unfortunately that work had
to be suspended when Hamas took over.
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