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Leaked Report Accuses Top UNRWA Officials of Misconduct, Mismanagement and Worse
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Shortly after midnight Sunday, July 28, Al Jazeera, followed shortly by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, broke a story that Washington Report’s U.N. Correspondent Ian Williams had been tracking for months. It exposed allegations that Pierre Krakenbuhl, the Swiss commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), had managed “an organizational culture characterized by low morale, fear of retaliation—including through non-renewal of contracts —distrust, secrecy, bullying, intimidation, and marginalization; a fundamental lack of leadership and ethics; and management that is highly dysfunctional, with a significant breakdown of the regular accountability structure.”
“The confidential report had been passed to us two months before,” Ian Williams said, “but we were reluctant to go public with it in the face of the American and Israeli attacks on UNRWA, so we tried for weeks to provoke action from the U.N. and UNRWA. Three senior managers left or were separated as a result of our inquiries, but the commissioner general remained in office, although this week his own government, Switzerland, cut funding, which should send a message. Clearly UNRWA needs reforming, and not of the kind that Likud and its allies in Washington, DC would want. In the next few weeks we hope to start a debate on how to structure an agency that is trying to cope with a 70-year-old and still worsening refugee crisis. U.N. and UNRWA officials are pleased that my article is provoking that debate.”
On the morning our report went out, Agence France-Presse seems to have copied it wholesale and passed it off as their own, but you would have learned it first here, in the Washington Report, and on Al Jazeera. |
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Young Palestinian men transport bags of flour outside an aid distribution center run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
SAID KHATIB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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