"They Fight it Best Themselves": AIC Position Paper on Corruption in the Palestinian Authority
Bryan Atinsky
“They Fight it Best Themselves”: AIC Position Paper on Corruption in the Palestinian Authority
“Corruption is authority plus monopoly minus transparency”
- Anonymous
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been repeatedly accused of corruption since it was established in 1994. The first audit conducted by the PA’s comptroller, whose findings were published in 1997, was self-critical. Since then, the battle waged by the Palestinian public and international donors against non-transparent practices of the PA has been ongoing, and is perceived in international circles as most successful under the direction of former Finance Minister and current Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Several international actors have also accused the PA of corruption, most notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a 2003 report that was widely covered in the local and international press. The IMF’s report of unaccounted public funds being diverted into private bank accounts prompted Israeli allegations at the time that the PA, and specifically Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, “financed terrorism.”
These accusations employ a concept, “corruption,” that can be defined and analyzed scientifically and objectively. However, this concept is employed within a political discourse that is highly moralistic and deeply embroiled in the domestic and international politics of the PA. The Alternative Information Center (AIC) believes that the political side of the problem is also where the solution can be found: to encourage and support the existing Palestinian domestic efforts to curb corruption.
Though corruption in its two primary forms, nepotism and bribery, has clear-cut definitions when set against a standard of good practice, the actual measurement of corruption is a problematic task in relation to the PA. It is by placing the reports of corruption in their political context that the matter can be better understood. During the second half of the 1990s, the Palestinian Authority and especially its Executive Branch, came under substantial internal pressure to explain two things: the appointment of “returnees” (previously exiled PLO politicians and fighters) to administrative positions in the PA, and the management of international donor funding. Prominent domestic critics of these placements included Hanan Ashrawi, Hasan Khreisheh and Abdel Jawad Saleh (chairs of the Palestinian Legislative Council’s Monitoring Committee), and many others in the leftist PLO parties and within the Fatah itself. These were politicians who had remained in the occupied Palestinian territories while the leadership operated in exile, or who had been involved in the Madrid Conference of 1991 as opposed to the secret negotiations of Oslo. These politicians reflected a widespread Palestinian view that their exiled leadership had signed a deficient agreement in the form of the Oslo Accords and had done so to line their pockets with unearned money. Under such internal pressure, the PA formed the General Control Institution that published the critical 1997 report, in which many of the legitimate concerns regarding procurement practices and embezzlement were addressed. It must be remembered, however, that much of the domestic criticism of PA corruption puts into question fundamental features of the PA structure, such as its utter dependence on international aid, and its establishment (by the Oslo Accords) features perceived as inherent to PA corruption.
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