PALESTINIANS BRACE FOR TRUMP AID CUTS
US threat to curtail funding will add instability to struggling host countries already coping with spillover from other regional crises
Kazakh intellectuals are all laughing and asking: How can you read anything written like this? It makes your eyes hurt.
TIMUR KOCAOGLU PROFESSOR OF TURKISH STUDIES AT MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
collapsing Soviet Union,” said Anar Fazylzhanov, deputy director of the Institute of Linguistics in Almaty, the country’s business and cultural capital. “But changing the alphabet was much more politically difficult in Kazakhstan.”
In the past two decades, however, the demographic balance has shifted in favour of ethnic Kazakhs, following the departure of many ethnic Russians, whose numbers fell from about 40% of the population at independence to about 20% today. This opened the way for Mr Nazarbayev to endorse the axing of Cyrillic.
“Cyrillic was part of Russia’s colonial project and many see the Latin alphabet as an antiimperial move,” said Dossym Satpayev, a prominent Kazakh political commentator.
The Russian Orthodox Church and Russian nationalists protested what they interpreted as a sellout to the West and an attack on Russian culture. Kazakhstan even had intelligence reports, according to experts familiar with the matter, that the Russian parliament was preparing a statement praising Mr Nazarbayev as a great statesman and pleading with him to preserve Cyrillic so as to cement his legacy as a leader who has kept the peace among different ethnic groups.
The move to the Latin alphabet accelerated in April with the establishment by Mr Nazarbayev of a National Commission for the Modernization of Society, which included a panel of linguists entrusted with working out how Kazakh sounds should be transcribed.
Because Kazakh features many sounds that are not easily rendered into either the Cyrillic or Latin alphabets without additional markers, a decision needed to be made whether to follow Turkish, which uses the Latin script but includes cedillas, tildes, breves, dots and other markers to clarify pronunciation, or invent alternative phonetic pointers.
In August, the linguists proposed using an alphabet that largely followed the Turkish model.
The president’s office, however, declared this a nonstarter because Turkish-style markers do not feature on a standard keyboard.
The scholars on the language commission, led by Erden Kazhybek, head of the Institute of Linguistics in Almaty, then suggested using digraphs, or several letters to indicate a single sound, like “ch” in English.
This approach initially got a warmer reception from the president’s entourage but was then banished when Mr Nazarbayev suddenly issued a decree on Oct 27 ordering that apostrophes be used instead of Turkish-style markers.
The modified Latin alphabet put forward by Mr Nazarbayev uses apostrophes to elongate or modify the sounds of certain letters. For example, the letter “I” with an apostrophe designates roughly the same sound as the second “I” in Fiji, while “I” on its own sounds like the vowel in fig. The letter “S” with an apostrophe indicates “sh”. Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e, and pronounced she-ee-ye.
“When scholars first learned about this, we were all in shock,” Mr Kazhybek said. Tipped off about the president’s proposals in advance, he had rushed to Astana, the Kazakh capital, to plead for a reconsideration but was told that apostrophes were not going away.
The only reason publicly cited by Mr Nazarbayev to explain why he did not want Turkishstyle phonetic markers is “there should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer”, he said in September. He also complained that using digraphs to transcribe special Kazakh sounds would cause confusion when people try to read English.
But others saw another possible motivation: Mr Nazarbayev may be eager to avoid any suggestion that Kazakhstan is turning its back on Russia and embracing pan-Turkic unity, a bugbear for Russian officials in both tsarist and Soviet times.
Mahmoud al-Qouqa can’t imagine life without the three sacks of flour, cooking oil and other staples he receives from the United Nations every three months. Living with 25 relatives in a crowded home in this teeming Gaza Strip slum, the meagre rations provided by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugee families, are the last thing keeping his family afloat in the territory hard hit by years of poverty and conflict. But that could be in danger as the United States, UNRWA’s biggest donor, threatens to curtail funding.
“It will be like a disaster and no one can predict what the reaction will be,’’ he said.
Across the Middle East, millions of people who depend on UNRWA are bracing for the worst. The expected cut could also add instability to struggling host countries already coping with spillover from other regional crises.
UNRWA was established in the wake of the 1948 Mideast war surrounding Israel’s creation. An estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in the fighting.
In the absence of a solution for these refugees, the UN General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA’s mandate, the original refugee camps have turned into concrete slums and more than 5 million refugees and their descendants now rely on the agency for services including education, health care and food. The largest populations are in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.
Seen by the Palestinians and most of the international community as providing a valuable safety net, UNRWA is viewed far differently by Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accuses the agency of perpetuating the conflict by helping promote an unrealistic dream that these people have the “right of return’’ to long-lost properties in what is now Israel.
“UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution,’’ he told foreign journalists last week. Noting that the Palestinians are the only group served by a specific refugee agency, he said UNRWA should be abolished and its responsibilities taken over by the main UN refugee agency.
Some in Israel have even tougher criticism, accusing UNRWA of teaching hatred of Israel in its classrooms and tolerating or assisting Hamas militants in Gaza.
Blaming the Palestinians for lack of progress in Mideast peace efforts, President Donald
Trump has threatened to cut American assistance to the Palestinians. UNRWA would be the first to be affected.
The US provides about $355 million a year to UNRWA, roughly one-third of its budget.
US officials in Washington said this week the administration is preparing to withhold tens of millions of dollars from the year’s first contribution, cutting a planned $125 million installment by half or perhaps entirely. The decision could come as early as Tuesday.
Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director in Gaza, said Washington has not informed the agency of any changes. However, “we are worried because of the statements ... in the media and the fact that the money hasn’t arrived yet,’’ he said.
Mr Schmale dismissed the Israeli criticisms, saying that individuals who spread incitement or aid militants are isolated cases and promptly punished. And he said Mr Netanyahu’s criticism should be directed at the UN General Assembly, which sets UNRWA’s mandate, not the agency itself.
Any cut in US aid could ripple across the region with potentially unintended consequences.
Gaza may be the most challenging of all of UNRWA’s operating areas. Two-thirds of Gaza’s 2 million people qualify for services, and its role is amplified given the poor state of the economy, which has been hit hard by three wars with Israel and an Israeli-Egyptian blockade since the Hamas militant group seized power over a decade ago. Unemployment is 43% and the poverty rate is 38%, according to the official Palestinian statistics office.
“Nowhere else are we the biggest service provider for the population of the entire territory,’’ Mr Schmale said. He said UNRWA provides food assistance to 1 million Gazans, calling it “an expression of collective shame for the international community”.
With more than 12,500 teachers, nurses and other staff, UNRWA is Gaza’s largest non-governmental employer. It is also involved in postwar reconstruction projects.
The dire situation in Gaza is evident inside Mr al-Qouqa’s home, which is so cramped the family has made sleeping spaces with wood boards and fabric. Two male family members are unemployed. Two others are Hamas civil servants and get paid only intermittently by the cash-strapped movement.
At 72, Mr al-Qouqa is worried about his grandchildren. “If UNRWA provides them with bread, they can remain patient. But if it was cut, what will they become? They will become thieves, criminals and a burden on society,’’ he said. Many believe Hamas, which administers schools and social services in Gaza, will step in to fill the void.
Jordan, a crucial ally in the US-led battle against Islamic militants, is home to the largest number of Palestinian refugees and their descendants — with nearly 2.2 million people eligible for UNRWA services. This has turned the UN agency into a major contributor to social welfare services in the country, which also hosts hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by war.
US aid cuts could heighten the threat of instability in Jordan, which is grappling with a worsening economy hurt by the spillover from conflict in neighbouring Syria and Iraq. More than one-third of Jordan’s young people are without jobs, turning them into potential targets for recruitment by extremists.
Most of the Palestinians eligible for UNRWA services in Jordan hold Jordanian citizenship, and some argue that this has ended their refugee status. But most maintain that UNRWA services are vital to propping up an important ally.
UNRWA’s services are also vital in Lebanon, where Palestinians are prohibited from working in skilled professions and owning property.
Lebanon is the least-welcoming Arab country to Palestinian refugees, because it does not want Palestinians to settle and because it does not want the refugees to upset the country’s delicate sectarian balance.
Camps in several cities are ringed by concrete barriers and Lebanese security forces use checkpoints to control who enters and leaves. A recent census found 175,000 Palestinian refugees or their descendants living in the country.
The civil war in Syria has made many Palestinians refugees twice over. Some 32,000 Palestinians who were living in Syria fled to Lebanon, according to UNRWA. In Syria, Palestinians enjoyed the right to own property and to work in all professions. They are not entitled to the same in Lebanon.
Balkees Hameed, 33, arrived in 2013 with her husband, two children and in-laws from Damascus, where their apartment was damaged by rocket fire. The family depends on UNRWA assistance to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building in Bourj al-Barajneh, a Beirut camp. Her husband wipes tables at a restaurant outside the camp. Mr Hameed, like all Palestinians, was painfully aware of the rumours coming out of Washington.
“We are already defeated and now they want to oppress us some more?’’ she asked.
While more than 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide are entitled to assistance from the UN’s general refugee relief agency, Palestinians are barred from it under the logic that UNRWA serves them.
But UNRWA in Lebanon is chronically underfunded, and the wave of Palestinians arriving from Syria has strained its finances even further.
“What UNRWA provides is not even a quarter of what a Palestinian refugee needs,’’ said Ramy Mansour, 34, who fled to Lebanon from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. “Take everything and return us to our homes. We don’t want any assistance or anything, just return us to our country.’’
It will be like a disaster and no one can predict what the reaction will be.
MAHMOUD AL-QOUQA PALESTINIAN REFUGEE