Don’t Forget the Other U.N. Scandal in the Middle East

The bar is high in the competition for worst U.N. scandal. Sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers across Africa? Killing thousands with cholera by polluting the Haitian water supply? Disturbing to be sure, but the recent news about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) seemed to eclipse them all. Presented with evidence, the agency had to fire at least nine employees for taking part in Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis and abduction of 240 more.

That is certainly the gravest crime ever committed by U.N. employees, yet the scandal with the greatest human cost was likely the U.N.’s delivery of massive subsidies to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime while it slaughtered its own people. From the earliest days of the war in Syria, which has killed upwards of half a million people, senior U.N. officials knew the regime was diverting or confiscating enormous amounts of humanitarian aid to finance its war effort. Nevertheless, they either resigned themselves to this arrangement or got in on the act, as did the World Health Organization chief in Damascus, who directed a multimillion-dollar contract to a personal associate while gifting cars and gold coins to regime officials. And the subsidies are still flowing into Syria today, even as donors suspend their funding of UNRWA in Gaza.

To overhaul UNRWA, the United States should apply three pivotal lessons from the ongoing Syria-aid fiasco. First, the U.N. is incapable of reforming itself, no matter how appalling the scandal. Second, threats from top donors to cut U.N. funding are the only way to force a change. Third, donors have to sustain the pressure, often for years, because the U.N. system can easily outlast a short-lived commitment to reform.

In 2013, after returning from Damascus, a senior U.N. official published a detailed account of the many ways the Assad regime had co-opted humanitarian efforts. He reported, “In government-controlled parts of Syria, what, where and to whom to distribute aid, and even staff recruitment, have to be negotiated and are sometimes dictated.” This enabled the regime to starve civilian populations under the control of rebel forces, a war crime. U.N. convoys even passed through starving, besieged towns on their way to deliver aid to areas under Assad’s control.

Public embarrassment briefly threatened to upend the U.N.’s relationship with Assad. In 2016, a pair of investigative reporters exposed the extensive misuse of funds, including more than $9 million spent on housing U.N. staff at the Four Seasons Damascus, partially owned by the regime. The ensuing uproar led Secretary-General António Guterres to launch a reform initiative that began with drafting a new set of principles to guide U.N. operations in Syria.

Numerous agencies fought to water down the document, which the U.N. never made public. The guidelines called for a special monitoring group to ensure their implementation, but it never held a single meeting. Guterres lost interest in the problem and preferred not to antagonize Assad’s patrons in Moscow, who might have interfered with the secretary-general’s pursuit of a second term. By the start of 2023, total U.N. spending at the Four Seasons Damascus had reached $95 million.

These developments were no secret to the United States and other leading donor nations, whose taxpayers were footing the bill for U.N. programs. Yet the donors never threatened to pull their funding. The Biden administration has refused to acknowledge the problem, even though senior lawmakers from both sides of the aisle warned him of its severity. They noted that the Assad regime recently confiscated $100 million over an 18-month period by manipulating the exchange rates it charged U.N. agencies.

Why have donors resigned themselves to extortion? Carsten Wieland, a German scholar and diplomat who spent years working on Syria at the U.N., dedicated a 2021 book, Syria and the Neutrality Trap, to that question. The short answer is that no one wants the moral responsibility for cutting off aid to a starving nation, even when the humanitarian effort as a whole is clearly failing. Donors confronted the same dilemma previously in Bosnia, Darfur, and Sri Lanka. As Wieland notes, the results were the same: The aid continued despite obvious manipulation and theft by the regime.

Against that backdrop, the suspension of aid to UNRWA is genuinely surprising. Then again, UNRWA employees literally attempted to get away with murder.

The full and indefinite suspension of aid may not be viable while the war in Gaza continues, since there is no other organization poised to take over UNRWA’s responsibilities. Yet once the United States and other donors complete their investigation of how Hamas turned UNRWA into a front for its operations, they should lock the agency into a root-and-branch reform plan with intrusive oversight by an independent board of directors. Or better yet, once the shooting stops, dismantle UNRWA and replace it with an agency not burdened by its own willful blindness to antisemitic terrorism.

DAVID ADESNIK is a senior fellow and the director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. @adesnik