PALESTINE: The EU pledged €120 million in funds to meet the basic needs of the Palestinian people yesterday ahead of militant group Hamas forming a new government.
The aid will be used to support the poor, pay electricity bills and the wages of the Palestinian Authority, which international experts warn is close to financial collapse.
The funds were sanctioned at a meeting of EU foreign ministers, which also issued a warning to Serbia to deliver war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic to the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or face a halt in EU entry talks.
The disbursement of aid to the Palestinian Authority has become an extremely sensitive political issue since the victory of Hamas in the elections late last year. The US government is demanding the return of $50 million aid to stop it falling into Hamas's hands when the group assumes power, probably next month. Israel has already halted the monthly transfer of tax payments to the Palestinians worth $50 million to $55 million, in protest at Hamas's election victory.
The EU, which is the largest donor to the Palestinians, is also threatening to halt aid unless Hamas rejects violence, and accepts Israel's right to exist and the current peace process.
But European external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said the EU needed to support the caretaker government of Mahmoud Abbas and meet the needs of the Palestinians population when she announced the new package of funds yesterday in Brussels.
"Today I will announce a very substantial package of assistance to meet basic needs . . . In effect we will pay electricity bills for them, direct to the utilities concerned, including in Israel," said Ms Ferrero-Waldner. She stressed that most of the €120 million package of shot-term aid would be administered by the UN rather than the Palestinian Authority. The financial package includes: €64 million for the UN agencies that serve the poorest in the Palestinian territories; €40 million for the utility companies that provide electricity and other basis services; and €17.5 million to pay the salaries of authority officials.
The decision by EU ministers to sanction the aid was made as international envoy James Wolfensohn warned that without emergency funds, the authority faced financial collapse within two weeks now that Israel had cut off tax transfers.
Mr Wolfensohn said that even if the authority survived with emergency funding, the financial crisis could bring violence and chaos unless the quartet of international mediators - the US, the EU, Russia and the UN - developed a long-term funding plan once a Hamas-led government was in place.
Ms Ferrero-Waldner said that even when Israel did transfer the tax revenues of the Palestinians to the authority, it still ran at a deficit. She called on other states, particularly Arab nations, to do more to fund the authority going forward.
Hamas official spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the EU decision was a step in the right direction.
"We in Hamas appreciate any foreign aid as long as it is not restricted by any conditions or a swap with the rights of our Palestinian people. The EU announcement represents a declaration of the failure of US and Israeli pressure on the West to impose a siege on the Palestinian people and on Hamas," he said.
Meanwhile, EU foreign ministers stepped up the pressure on Serbia to co-operate with ICTY. European enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn warned that talks between Belgrade and the commission on future EU membership for Serbia would be put on ice unless it co-operated with the tribunal. "It is high time Serbia reached full co-operation with ICTY that should lead to the arrest and transfer of Ratko Mladic," Mr Rehn said.
Mladic, who has been a wanted man since 1995, is one of the top two war criminals in the Balkans. It has been alleged that the Serbian military helped him evade capture up to now and ICTY chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte has noted that Serbia's co-operation with her tribunal had been deteriorating over the past year.
However, Serbian foreign minister Vuk Draskovic, in Brussels to meet his EU counterparts, was optimistic Mladic could be delivered.