JIHADI CASH ‘JUST TIP OF THE ICEBERG’
Calls to shut down secret government aid fund that ‘hands money to terrorists’
THE ‘secretive’ Government fund that has allegedly bolstered jihadis and tyrants must be shut down, campaigners said yesterday.
The call came as the Foreign Office halted a £12million taxpayer-funded aid project in Syria over fears some of the cash had gone to terrorists.
But campaigners warned that the case was just the ‘tip of the iceberg’.
The £1billion Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF), which gets half its money from the aid budget, has handed cash to military and security projects in countries notorious for human-rights abuses.
The fund – overseen by the National Security Council and chaired by the Prime Minister – has a ‘serious lack of transparency’ making it impossible for MPs or the public to properly scrutinise it, according to the report by charity Global Justice Now.
It said projects included £3.5million to Bahrain for teaching police how to ‘command and control’ demonstrators with water cannon and dogs, as well as ‘evidence gathering and tactical advice’.
The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy has accused the UK of ‘managing repression in an authoritarian regime, paid by the taxpayer’.
UK cash has also been given to help senior security officers in Ethiopia study for postgraduate degree programmes.
Since 2016, Ethiopian security forces have killed hundreds of protesters and detained tens of thousands.
Another £400,000 from the fund has gone to bolster armed forces in Sudan, where head of state Omar al-Bashir faces five counts of crimes against humanity from the International Criminal Court.
CSSF said the Sudanese cash was to help ‘improve governance and accountability… human rights and the rule of law’.
Aisha Dodwell, of Global Justice Now, said: ‘It is shocking that the British Government is funding security forces across the world, including in some of the most tyrannical regimes.
‘When you add in that some of these funds come from the aid budget, it just gets more scandalous. It is impossible to know which projects have had aid money spent on them because of the extensive secrecy surrounding this fund – with the public and even MPs in the dark about large parts of this programme. The fear must be that this Syria scandal is the tip of the iceberg.
‘Already in its short life, the CSSF has been involved in a number of scandals. We believe it is not fit for purpose and should be closed down. Aid money must be spent on poverty alleviation and the UK should be standing against human rights abuses, not enabling them.’ Kate Osamor, Labour’s international development spokesman, last night wrote to Boris Johnson to demand answers on CSSF spending, asking the Foreign Secretary for ‘concrete assurances’ these aid projects were ‘being managed properly and not contributing to human-rights violations’.
It comes after BBC Panorama reported last night how British taxpayers’ cash that was handed over to set up a civilian police force in Syria had helped extremists.
One Al Qaeda-backed group has selected officer recruits while another extremist cell siphoned off cash in a protection racket, the programme alleged.
A number of employees on the payroll of the Free Syrian Police were either fictitious or dead.
The Panorama investigation also raised concerns about the way the CSSF programme is run by Adam Smith International (ASI), a foreign-aid contractor which has been accused of making excess profits. ASI said it refuted Panorama’s ‘false and misleading allegations’ about the Syria project.
But the Foreign Secretary suspended the project pending an investigation, and even Oxfam warned of the lack of ‘transparency
and oversight’ for a growing proportion of Britain’s foreign handouts.
Katy Chakrabortty, of Oxfam, said there were ‘legitimate concerns’ about the aid-budget money handed out by departments other than the Department for International Development (DfID), adding: ‘The Government should not increase aid spent by other departments further without ensuring that it meets the high standards set by DfID.’
There is a story — alas, true — of an American aid worker visiting a village in Pakistan where a school had supposedly been built with foreign largesse.
On finding none, he inquired as to its whereabouts and was told by an official, with a shrug: ‘ It is probably a Mitsubishi Pajero, driving around Islamabad.’
The abuse and theft of foreign aid is a story as old as the hills into which much of the money disappears. Thus the latest horror — that British taxpayers’ money supposed to fund policing in ‘Free Syria’ has allegedly been diverted into the pockets of jihadis — is merely a twist in a longrunning scandal.
Last night’s BBC Panorama investigation of the activities of a contractor named Adam Smith International shows the full range of aid abuses in play: ASI seems to be chiefly a vehicle for enriching its own founders and managers.
Wasted
Accountability by the Foreign Office and Department for International Development (DfID), the bodies responsible for disbursing £13 billion of our money this year, has yet again been shown to fail.
Panorama claims ASI has been paying ‘policemen’, some of whom are fictitious or dead, and that this is the tip of an iceberg. Its employees on the ground are earning up to £850 a day, though they cannot set foot in Syria itself.
The so- called Free Syrian Police have apparently been paid from bags of aid cash disbursed with the carelessness of stale bread to pigeons in the park. For its part, ASI strongly denies the allegations.
I am not among those who think all foreign aid is wasted money. But this saga shows again that almost everything is wrong with the machinery for seeing that Britain’s money ends up in the right hands.
One of Tony Blair’s many follies as prime minister was the establishment of DfID separate from the Foreign Office.
The result was to emasculate Britain’s embassies in Africa and Asia, where the ability to allocate some cash conferred their only clout, and place this power in the hands of a body whose only purpose was to find homes for a now fixed 0.7 per cent of British GDP — although the Syrian fiasco appears to have been under Foreign Office supervision.
Many DfID staff are social engineers, often rotating in and out of jobs with NonGovernmental Organisations (NGOs), who are eager to do good in the world but understand little about accountability, especially in regions where those who hold political power — or merely own guns — take for granted their right to steal any cash foreigners are foolish enough to strew in their path.
It is shocking how cynically even famous aid charities escape the sort of accountability taken for granted by commercial enterprises and public institutions.
A year or two ago, there was a scandal when it was shown that foreign aid charities pay their bosses wildly extravagant six-figure salaries.
They also spend a large slice of their income from donations on advertising, administration and further fundraising, so that of every pound we give, a dismayingly small proportion ends up feeding the poor and hungry.
Since DfID was created, it has proudly trumpeted that Britain gives a larger slice of its GDP in foreign aid than any other country save Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations.
Yet there seems precious little evidence that more than a fraction of this money winds up helping those for whom it is intended, and almost no sign that Britain’s generosity secures real gratitude — for instance in Pakistan, the largest recipient, followed by ethiopia and Afghanistan, Nigeria and Syria.
Several big aid distribution companies — through which many millions of the DfID budget are channelled — have incurred critical scrutiny in recent years, especially for their generosity to their own big shareholders, including Marie Stopes International and Oxford Policy Management.
A Commons committee last spring reported hearing of one company that invoiced DfID for 141 per cent of the true cost of its overseas staff.
ASI’s turnover peaked in 2014 at £111 million, most of this from British government sources. It is shocking to learn that the company has continued to receive cash after past revelations about its management — for instance, allegations that it falsified testimonials about its activities laid before a Commons committee, something ASI denies.
Its 105 employees earn average salaries of more than £60,000: amazingly high for an organisation supposedly committed to good deeds.
ASI’s defence includes the assertion that its staff work in ‘one of the most challenging environments in the world’.
Stolen
It is true that overseas aid bodies must struggle to assist the poor and hungry amid a sea of corruption. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, it was found that mountains of aid supplies and vehicles lay at Colombo airport, held hostage by Sri Lankan customs, pending payment of ‘special duty’ on everything, including medical supplies.
South Sudan is notorious as an essentially criminal state at the mercy of warlords, most of whom reside in Nairobi. It has been estimated that two-thirds of all foreign aid shipped to Somalia in the first decade of the century was stolen.
As for ASI, we know millions of people inside and immediately outside Syria are suffering terribly; that it is hard to channel aid to them amid chronic lawlessness and rule by local jihadi groups. But none of this excuses the apparent exploitation of chaos and tragedy by the contractor to enrich itself, while failing miserably to supervise spending on the ground.
The Foreign Office has belatedly suspended the Syrian programme at the heart of the Panorama allegations. It has already barred ASI from bidding for further contracts, following earlier charges laid against the company.
Although DfID is not directly responsible for this aid scandal, it has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness and should be wound up. Its functions should again be undertaken by the Foreign Office.
Greedy
The obsessive 0.7 per cent of GDP aid target, which David Cameron enshrined in law, should be scrapped.
In order to meet it, millions are entrusted to rackety charities and contractors which lack the machinery — sometimes also the honesty — to see the money is spent wisely.
There is real merit in helping the needy in faraway countries, especially if it helps to keep them at home and discourages them from joining the vast South-North migration. But the British Government’s desperation to meet its entirely artificial giveaway objective means our money is being thrown at all manner of people unfit to steward it.
The Adam Smith scandal may yet do some good, by causing both the Government and the public to insist that enough is enough. The aid juggernaut has run out of control for too long.
Foreign aid has been a racket which has escaped proper scrutiny because its practitioners hide behind the blanket defence that ‘we are trying to do good’.
But aid contractors and charities have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves and must be policed as rigorously as all other institutions and commercial enterprises.
The British people want to give a fraction of their relative wealth to help those much less fortunate than themselves. But their goodwill can no longer be exploited by the greedy, the criminal — and now, we discover, even by some of our mortal enemies.