United Nations Radio

Karen AbuZayd

PRES: November 29th is the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. On that day in 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution on the partition of Palestine. The hostilities that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, led to the flight of some 750,000 Palestinian refugees, sparking the longest lasting refugee crisis in recent history. In December 1949 the General Assembly established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) which this year marks its 60th anniversary. For most of the past decade the agency has been led by Commissioner General Karen AbuZayd. UN Radio's May Yaacoub sat down with Ms. AbuZayd while she was in New York for the commemoration of UNRWA's 60th anniversary, and asked her to reflect on her time with the agency, which is coming to an end soon.

AbuZayd: Very rewarding and fulfilling in some ways and very frustrating and angering and just difficult over the nine years, because it got worse throughout the time.

Yaacoub: You are retiring at the end of the year, what are your expectations for the Palestinian crisis, which is known to be the longest and the biggest around the world?

AbuZayd: Yes well that's one of the places where I have the frustrations and the worries about the future and what is going to happen next or how soon. I mean one can also think of small steps forward, but then you think of lots of steps back, mainly because there were the recurrent conflicts, first of all the second Intifada, then what happened after the elections in the Palestinian Authority and just down hill ever since then. The climax of this conflict in Gaza in December and January, which was the worst of all.

Yaacoub: Looking back at your work with UNRWA what do you think would have been done to improve the service of UNRWA for the Palestinian refugees?

AbuZayd: Well, the best thing that could have been done is to get more money. The things that we weren't able to do, you know, at the behest of donors, which we agreed, was to try to improve the living conditions of the refugees after fifty or more years in refugee camps and wanting to fix up the houses at least, this sort of thing. So we had a budget that we did because the donors asked us to a needs based budget and said this is what we need to do. We need more classrooms, because we have double shifting. We need more doctors, because we have a hundred patients a day seeing a doctor and you know we just needed to do some work that took maybe $100,000,000 a year and that is a gap that has stayed in our budget for the last five years.

Yaacoub: You just mentioned the budget. Do you have any other problem that hinder UNRA's work and the camps of Palestinians?

AbuZayd: Well, there are all sorts of obstacles depending where we work. Right now of course we're not able to do any kind of work in the camps or any kind of reconstruction work in Gaza, because there're no materials coming in. In West Bank we have different kinds of problems, difficult access problems, just getting around because of all the road blocks and the earth mounds and the checkpoints and the things like this, so even our people can't move let alone goods and trucks and so on. So, yeah, we have problems like that. We used to have problems in Lebanon of even getting anything into the camps, but that has changed so much in the last few years, and we were able to finally do something to improve conditions for refugees in Lebanon.

Yaacoub: Any plans for the renovation of the camp over there?

AbuZayd: If you're talking about Nahr al-Bared we have a major plan of course that's been worked out with the refugees themselves and with the local authorities, and we have begun to raise the money for that. We have run up against obstacle after obstacle and the latest one is the antiquities that have been found beneath the surface of the camp. There's a case that's been taken against the government to have a camp stopped at this point. The government thinks that they will win the case and go ahead and begin to build. Meanwhile we're removing the rubble from the whole camp and we would like to get started just as soon as we can, because the people have been in temporary housing for 2 years now.

Yaacoub: Who are you major donors and contributors to UNRWA?

AbuZayd: Well the same donors that are the major donors to most humanitarian agencies. The largest are the Americans and the European commission. Also then other European donors and other western donors, mainly. The Arab donors are quite good at giving us money for our projects - you know, building budgets and for the emergency - or trying to get them to help us on what we call the general fund, which is our basic services, our core mandate really for the healthcare, primary education and so on. So that's the thing that's mostly salaries, because we employ 30,000 people, ¾ of them teachers, so it's very important that we're able to keep those salaries going.

PRES: Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General of UNRWA.

Producer: May Yaacoub
Duration: 3'32"