Ottawa to Syrian rebels: fund yourselves

John Kerry believes it’s a good idea to fund Syrian rebels despite the blurry lines among Syrian reformers, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda fighters.  Canada disagrees.  Overlooked this insightful piece from the Globe & Mail last month, which lays out the reasons for Canada’s position.

Hat tip to Vlad Tepes, who is rightfully proud of Canada’s approach, and notes that Canada’s decision “should be obvious to everyone.”  True.

Too risky to fund Syrian rebels, Canada says

By CAMPBELL CLARK

The Globe and Mail

OTTAWA - The United States has shifted course to provide aid directly to Syria’s rebels, but Canada doesn’t have enough confidence in them to follow suit.

It is a rare international question where the two allies are taking different views: Canada, which was gung-ho about helping rebels in Libya, thinks it’s too risky to fund those in Syria.

On Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States will for the first time send so-called non-lethal aid such as food and medical supplies directly to the Free Syrian Army, as well as provide $60-million to the political wing of the coalition seeking to unseat President Bashar al-Assad.

While that fell short of the pledges of arms and equipment that Syrian rebels really want, it marks a shift in U.S. policy to directly support rebels fighting the Assad regime.

“We do this because we need to stand on the side of those in this fight who want to see Syria rise again in unity and see a democracy and human rights and justice,” Mr. Kerry said after a meeting in Rome of countries supporting the opposition.

But Canada – unlike the United States, most of Europe and much of the Arab world – has never recognized the opposition’s umbrella organization, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, as the “legitimate representative” of Syrians. And it’s not about to follow the U.S. allies in sending aid to the Free Syrian Army, either.

“After 23 months of violence and 70,000 deaths, the answer to the crisis in Syria is not more violence,” said Rick Roth, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. “Canada is working to address the humanitarian crisis the conflict in Syria has produced.”

Ottawa has long expressed worries about the fractious nature of the Syrian opposition and about Islamist extremists in their midst. In December, when dozens of countries recognized the coalition, Mr. Baird said he was waiting for the opposition to be more inclusive to minorities and women, and denounce extremism.

The Harper government has not changed its stand – essentially, it still doesn’t trust the opposition, or feel confident it can send money to rebels without some of it ending up in the hands of Islamist fighters whom it views as a danger that could live on past the anti-Assad rebellion. Ottawa will still try to work with the Syrian opposition and fund efforts to aid refugees, government sources said, but hasn’t changed its mind on sending aid to rebels.

It’s a stand that has baffled Syrian-Canadian groups. “We don’t really understand the Canadian position,” said Khaled Sawaf, president of the Syrian Canadian Council. It’s one thing to decide not to send weapons to the Free Syrian Army, but there’s no reason to withhold aid like food and medical supplies, he said.

Mr. Kerry said one reason for sending money to the Syrian coalition is to try to counter the influence of extremists. “The stakes are really high. And we can’t risk letting this country, in the heart of the Middle East, be destroyed by vicious autocrats or hijacked by the extremists,” he said…

Now if we could just get Canada to do something about unfortunate investment activities in the Sudan…

Cash for Karzai in suitcases, backpacks, and grocery bags

Good old Uncle Moneybags is back, but this time his sacks are filled with American money for distribution to cronies and warlords.  From the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Karzai Confirms Accepting CIA Cash Monthly for 10 Years

By JUHANA ROSSI in Helsinki and YAROSLAV TROFIMOV in Kabul

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Monday acknowledged that his office has been receiving money from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency over the past 10 years, dismissing the monthly cash payments as a “small amount.”

Mr. Karzai addressed the issue after the New York Times reported on Sunday that the CIA has made tens of millions of dollars in secret payments, often cash packed in shopping bags, as it sought to maintain influence over Afghanistan’s mercurial leader.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, here in Brussels last week, Monday confirmed that his government has been receiving CIA money for a decade, but dismissed it as a ‘small amount.’

“Yes, the office of the national security has been receiving support from the United States for the past 10 years,” Mr. Karzai told reporters at a news briefing in Helsinki, Finland, responding to a question about whether he has received CIA cash. “Monthly. Not a big amount. A small amount which has been used for various purposes.”

The CIA declined to comment on the matter.

Mr. Karzai, who is touring Northern Europe, made the remarks following his meeting with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto.

The U.S. isn’t the only country to supply the Afghan presidential palace with secret money. In 2010, Mr. Karzai acknowledged receiving bags full of euros from the government of Iran.

Afghan officials have said that these secret funds have been used by the president to reward supporters and buy loyalty from tribal leaders…

Time to take a second look at the proposal to cease foreign aid in Afghanistan?  Or is that still considered “a bit dramatic“?

By the way, if a U.S. company did what a federal agency has done by transferring money to Karzai, that company would be prosecuted under the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Money Jihad has previously covered the money that Hamid Karzai received from Iran here.

Terror deaths and Pakistan aid correlated

The number of civilian fatalities from terrorist attacks in Pakistan is rising on a similar trend line with U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan over the past 10 years.

The foreign aid isn’t working. It actually appears to be backfiring. More aid = more terror.

Although American financial aid to Pakistan has begun declining, there is no appetite in Washington, D.C., to stop spending taxpayer dollars to fund the de facto terrorist state of Pakistan.  Sen. Rand Paul was right to push for at least making aid to Pakistan conditional.  Although Sen. Paul’s latest effort was defeated, these findings should give some reason for reconsideration:

Sources: Congressional Research Service and SATP.org, graph by MoneyJihad

The possible correlation resembles the relationship between aid to the Palestinian territories and the number of Palestinian terrorist attacks.

Data for this graph were compiled from CRS and SATP reports.

Obama’s 10 biggest terror finance blunders

1. Promising to make it easier for Muslims to give zakat.  Pres. Obama has tried to remove the so-called “chilling effect” that George W. Bush, the Patriot Act, the Treasury Department, and law enforcement “created” by closing down Islamic charities that funded terrorism.  Rather than building on the Bush administration’s successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for sponsoring Hamas, Obama won’t prosecute Islamic Relief, he won’t prosecute CAIR, he won’t investigate ISNA or NAIT, and the IRS has been derelict in stripping suspicious Islamic organizations of their tax-exempt status.
2. Funding the Arab Spring that has led to the rise of Muslim Brotherhood dominated governments in the Middle East who behave against U.S. national security interests.
3. Minimizing our energy independence from Middle East oil by reducing oil production on federal lands and waters, rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, impeding hydraulic fracturing permitting, etc.
4. Making little to no progress on bankrupting the Taliban.
5. Dragging his feet in adopting sanctions against Al Qaeda and Taliban affiliates such as the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani network.

$45 million more for Islamist rebels

This announcement is consistent with prior Obama-Clinton payments for the pitchfork and torch bearers of the Arab Spring.  The foreign aid will supposedly provide peaceful Syrian dissidents with food, medicine, radios, and unspecified “technical support.”

Great!  What could go wrong?  Perhaps we should ask the family of Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Clinton offers $45 million to Syrian rebels, who want more support

By Hannah Allam | McClatchy Newspapers

NEW YORK — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday announced $45 million in additional aid for Syrian opposition activists, the latest U.S. push for influence in a civil war that’s raged beyond the international community’s control.

Clinton announced the new aid package before meeting with visiting Syrian dissidents on the margins of this week’s U.N. General Assembly, where world leaders sounded bleaker than ever about the prospects for a negotiated political resolution to the 18-month uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. humanitarian aid for Syria now will total more than $132 million this year, though Syrian rebels are more interested in weapons and military training than in the American promises of more “nonlethal assistance.” Of the $45 million pledged Friday, $30 million is earmarked for humanitarian assistance and $15 million for radios, training and other technical support for opposition activists.

The U.S. government has refused to directly arm or fund the so-called Free Syrian Army, a loose confederation of rebel militias, largely out of fear that the assistance would make its way to Islamist extremist groups that have joined the battle to unseat Assad.

U.S. policy is in a “really tough spot,” said Joseph Holliday, a Washington-based researcher at the Institute for the Study of War who specializes in the Syrian conflict. While the administration’s instincts to withhold direct aid from rebel fighters is understandable, he said, that strategy is backfiring.

“The irony of our fear of supplying Islamist groups is that the others who are arming the opposition – the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks – are doing just that, providing weapons and ammunition to Islamists,” Holliday said. “Our lack of giving support is actually leading to the Islamicization of the opposition.”

Despite the resignation at the U.N. now to a drawn-out, increasingly bloody conflict, the Obama administration remains focused on courting remnants of the peaceful protest movement, whom analysts say don’t enjoy the same street credibility as the armed opposition forces confronting Assad’s military.

The United States is helping to train and organize nonviolent actors in hopes they’ll take the lead in an eventual post-Assad transition, though deep ideological and other divisions have so far prevented the Syrian activists from coalescing into a government-in-waiting, such as the one Libyans formed in the months before the fall of strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Analysts describe the U.S. gamble on one segment of the opposition as part of a continued lack of U.S. strategy for Syria that’s left the administration with no real inroads to either the Assad regime or the rebel militias – the two sides to the civil war that’s already spilling beyond Syria’s borders.

Only recently, analysts say, did the government back off from the Syrian National Council, a collection of exiles and technocrats the U.S. government had tried in vain to whip into a viable transitional body.

Be aware that the aid pledge may violate U.S. law:  the Syrian Accountability Act prohibits aid to Syria without respect to the recipient unless Syria restores Lebanese sovereignty, renounces Hezbollah, and terminates its weapons of mass destruction programs.

Spending our way to extinction

Ran across this graphic recently uploaded to a website called Meme Generator:

This would be a great postcard to send to Hillary Clinton.

If we offer money to the Taliban to reconcile with Hamid Karzai, wouldn’t that make us terrorist financiers?  If we fund rebels in Libya, and they turn around and assassinate our ambassador, does that mean we funded a terror attack?  If we expend foreign aid for the Palestinian Authority that is transferred to Gaza, aren’t we enriching Hamas?  If we open the floodgates of aid to Syrian insurgents who include Al Qaeda, does that mean we’re bankrolling Al Qaeda?

Yup.

Peace in our time… if the price is right

The Taliban is willing to accept truce with the government of Afghanistan contingent on the replacement of U.S. military presence with U.S. “economic assistance,” according to a report published this month describing interviews of Taliban leaders conducted by the Royal United Services Institute.

Can you imagine the pain that the 9/11 victims’ families would endure if their tax dollars were spent on foreign aid to a Karzai-Taliban coalition government?  It is outrageous that our government would even consider negotiations under terms floated in the RUSI interviews.

PFLP enriched by Australian aid

A civil rights legal foundation that represents the victims of terrorism is reporting that the Australian government is passing funds to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group through two non-governmental organizations.  Chalking it up to confusion over names, the government of Australia claims it has done nothing wrong.

Of course it isn’t the first time that a Western government has funded Gaza jihadists through gross negligence, and it won’t be the last.  From the Israel Law Center via Israel.co.nz:

World Vision Continuing to Fund Terror Group?

Last February Shurat HaDin [Israel Law Center] revealed that the large NGO World Vision, which distributes massive amounts of Australian government aid to Gaza, has been funding a Palestinian terrorist organization’s charitable front. AusAid, the Australian government’s entity in charge of supervising the country’s foreign aid grants, initially suspended funding to the Union of Agricultural Workers Committees (UAWC), alleged by us to be an instrument for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP is a designated terrorist organization in Australia and the providing of any material support to it is illegal.

After suspending funding for a month, however, AusAid, on behalf of Australia’s Foreign Ministry, declared it had thoroughly investigated the matter and found no reason why it shouldn’t reinstate its support for the PFLP group. AusAid, while announcing this resumption of funding, proclaimed that it decided to reinstate its support to the UAWC because it was a registered charity in Israel! We were shocked by this explanation, as we had already searched and could not find that the UAWC was listed in Israel’s registry of charities. Moreover, there was overwhelming proof that there was a connection between the UAWC and PFLP. The PFLP’s website stated that it established the UAWC, with the latter agreeing that the terrorist group could utilize its Gaza buildings for training. In addition, several of UAWC’s executive directors are known terrorists, including its director, Bashir al Khieri, who had served time in an Israeli prison for PFLP activities. This past week, the UAWC even put out press releases complaining that Israel’s security services recently raided their offices in Jericho and arrested staff members for their involvement in terrorism.

All of this is going on while AusAid continues to publicly maintain that the UAWC is not the PFLP. Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, defending AusAid, gave public assurances that no Australian taxpayer funds were being provided to the Palestinian terrorist group. After our investigation, it was conclusively determined that a tremendous fraud was being perpetrated by World Vision and AusAid against the Australian public. Above all, the organization they claim is registered in Israel is not the UAWC but a different charity with a similar sounding name – the Committee of Agricultural Works (CAW). CAW and the UAWC, which AusAid believes is one and the same, have very similar names but were founded ten years apart, all while having a totally different board of directors. One is indeed registered in Israel and the other is indeed an instrument of the PFLP.

Amazingly, AusAid and World Vision continue to pretend that they are funding the Israeli charity CAW, while Australian funds are actually being provided to the UAWC in Gaza.

Seven ways to stop funding terror

Money Jihad has previously proposed methods to limit zakat and hawala—two major mechanisms for funding terror.  Here’s a more comprehensive set of our recommendations that would reduce terrorist financing overall:

1. Drill, baby, drill.  The U.S. should expand offshore oil drilling, open federal lands for drilling, ease its permitting process for new refineries, encourage hydraulic fracturing methods that tap previously inaccessible energy sources underground, and approve the Keystone XL pipeline.  Increasing domestic U.S. and Western Hemisphere energy production will reduce reliance on Persian Gulf oil supplies and thereby minimize the profits reaped by hostile, foreign regimes that sponsor terror.
2. Eliminate foreign aid to Pakistan.  Pakistan uses its ISI spy service to fund the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.  Continuing to waste money on Pakistan is not only wasteful when we can least afford it, but it is suicidal.
3. Study the true enemy and threat.  Among the most important concepts for the Western public to understand are:
   • The Koran calls upon Muslims to strive with their lives and wealth for the cause of jihad (Chapter 9, Verse 41).
   • Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam, shall be allocated to several categories in accordance with the Koran 9:60, one of which is for those waging jihad for Allah.
   • Islam imposes the jizya tax on “infidels” living in Muslims territory (Koran 9:29), even today.
   • Islam calls for taxes on Muslims apart from zakat such as khums and ushr which finance terrorist organizations throughout the Islamic world.
   • Sharia finance is a destructive, opaque financial system that has kept Islamic economies in tatters for centuries.
   • Sharia banks and halal businesses are involved in financing terrorism.
   • Radical Muslims believe, as Anwar al-Awlaki instructed them, that there is a basis in Islamic law for stealing (through robbery, welfare fraud, tax cheating, etc.), especially if the theft takes place to finance jihad.

   If we fail to acknowledge Islam as the animating force behind terror finance, we’ll get confused and aim at the wrong targets.  For example, we’ve spent billions of dollars complying with extensive bureaucratic requirements such as currency reports that have yielded minimal results.

4. Launch a new offensive against Muslim American charities and entities that fund terrorism.  Pick a few of the highest profile ones and make an example of them by prosecuting their leaders and dressing them in orange jumpsuits.  Prosecute Islamic Relief USA under the laws against providing material support for terrorism.  Prosecute the Council on American-Islamic Relations under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.  Strip the halal food certifier IFANCA and the mosque deed financier North American Islamic Trust of their tax-exempt status.

Campbell: €18m giveaway to teach Resistance

Author and researcher Jacob Campbell

Jacob Campbell, a research fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, has uncovered a European Commission plan to subsidize Lebanese schools despite the announcement by Lebanon’s eduction minister and Hezbollah official that students will be taught “a culture of Resistance.”  Specifically, the European Union has pledged €3.8 million for a Lebanese citizen education program and is contributing €13.7 million toward Lebanon’s “Education Sector Development Plan.”

This assumes that the money won’t be lost forever as it’s channeled through a completely tainted Lebanese financial system prior to its arrival at the indoctrination camps.

Here’s an excerpt from Campbell’s article, “Helping Hezbollah“:

… If Hezbollah is to consolidate its rule over Lebanon, it must command the loyalty of the country’s youth. And, having inherited the previous government’s five-year Education Sector Development Plan (ESDP), Hezbollah is in the ideal position to achieve this by embedding its own ideology into Lebanon’s education system.

Keen to support the strengthening of “students’ national identity and civic responsibilities” in a nation as perennially blighted by sectarian strife as Lebanon is the European Union, which has committed €3.8 million for the development of a citizenship education programme in Lebanese schools. Well-intentioned as this is, it overlooks the fact that Hezbollah’s conception of civic responsibility is fundamentally at odds with the European Union’s. This was most starkly evident in February, when the Lebanese Minister of Education issued a memorandum obligating all public schools to spend an hour imbuing “the culture of Resistance” in children.

Nor has Hezbollah’s attempt to indoctrinate an entire generation stopped there. As part of the ESDP, which the European Union is co-financing with a total budget of €13.7 million, the Lebanese government is seeking to launch a standardised history curriculum. According to the most recent proposal, history lessons will include teaching pupils to appreciate “the Resistance’s importance in terms of defending Lebanon”. The draft syllabus has also been criticised for writing the pro-democracy Cedar Revolution out of Lebanon’s history, as well as omitting Lebanon’s struggle against the Syrian army and Palestinian militias during the civil war. To all impartial observers, it is clear that Hezbollah is exploiting the ESDP to greatly exaggerate its centrality to Lebanese national identity.

When Paul Nuttall MEP submitted a parliamentary question asking whether the European Commission would cancel its financial assistance to the Lebanese Ministry of Education in light of Hezbollah’s efforts to brainwash students, Commissioner Štefan Füle responded by saying that any cessation of funding “would be counterproductive”. Given that the Lebanese Minister of Education announced in May that he has enlisted the help of his Iranian counterpart in implementing the ESDP, the European Commission ought to consider that what is truly counterproductive is sponsoring a project that appears to have been outsourced to Hezbollah’s paymasters in Tehran…

Read the full piece here.

Mr. Campbell also tells Money Jihad that, “As a Eurosceptic, I resent the squandering of taxpayers’ money by an unelected and unaccountable European Commission,” especially if it empowers Hezbollah—an organization committed to terrorism against Israel.

If you live in Europe or America (and especially if you’re a young adult), you too must be wary of a future of being saddled with public debt incurred by profligate politicians elected decades before you could even vote.  The money involved in this Lebanese case may not seem like much in the grand scheme of government waste and abuse.  But how long can your government sustain itself when it engages in, not just expensive welfare programs at home, but continuous foreign aid welfare to an Islamic world that is innately hostile and unappreciative of Europe and the U.S.?

Incidentally, U.S. aid to Lebanon was $73.1 million in 2008, $125.7 in 2009, an estimated $229 million in 2010, and a requested $246.3 million in 2011 according to a Congressional Research Service report.

Billion dollar giveaways for Islam’s rising tide

The G-8 is  doubling down on its promises last year of creating a $20 billion Islamist stimulus package of aid and loans by offering a “New Transition Fund” (ie, international donor aid that the recipients can use as slush funds) to Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia plus a “Capital Markets Access Initiative” (ie, loan guarantees) as part of an overall plan called the “Deauville Partnership.”

This time the G-8 claims that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Turkey will be donors too, although no pledged amounts are disclosed in the official press release.

With personal musings in italics, here’s the press release filled with euphemisms for how many of your tax dollars and tax euros will go to help line the pockets of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, or to repress their political opponents, or both:

Deauville Partnership with Arab Countries in Transition Fact Sheet on Finance

5/21/2012

Context

The Middle East and North Africa region is undergoing one of the most important transitions of our time. The G-8 launched the Deauville Partnership with Arab Countries in Transition[1] to support the historic changes in the Middle East and North Africa. In the face of numerous challenges, the five transitioning countries (Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia) have taken important steps to toward democracy and economic development. However, these countries face growing economic challenges, including a difficult external environment and, for some countries, delays in the political transition.

For which the only possible solution could be throwing more money at the transitioning countries, right?

The Partnership’s efforts on finance focus on economic stabilization, near-term job creation, and economic governance to help the Partnership countries move towards sustainable and inclusive growth. Specifically, the Partnership is launching a Capital Markets Access Initiative, creating a new Transition Fund, and promoting assistance by International Financial Institutions (IFI) in a coordinated and effective way.

Coordinated and effective you say?  Well, how could we possibly argue with that?

Capital Markets Access Initiative

 

The heightened uncertainty associated with political transitions has meant that the five transitioning countries face significant constraints in financing their budgets and accessing external capital to support much-needed investments. Access to private sector finance for governments and businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, will be important to restoring economic stability, increasing jobs, reducing poverty, and boosting long-term growth. Since the events of last year, the Partnership countries and their private sectors have experienced reduced access to the international capital markets.

If banks have reduced lending to these countries, that should serve as a signal that such loans are a risky bet.  But somehow our politicians think they have a better sense of the creditworthiness of these nations than professional bankers who do this for a living.

The Capital Markets Access Initiative aims to help the transitioning countries reintegrate into international capital markets under reasonable financing terms to fill their sizable financing gaps and to allow their enterprises to invest in job-creating projects. In particular, the Initiative creates a collective approach to channel credit enhancement and political risk insurance instruments to transitioning countries and their private sectors.

As an example of the work of this initiative, on April 20, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Tunisian Finance Minister Houcine Dimassi signed a declaration of intent to proceed with a U.S. loan guarantee for Tunisia. Since the signing of the declaration, teams from the U.S. and Tunisian governments have made considerable progress toward signing a loan guarantee agreement and hope to proceed as quickly as possible with additional actions that would allow the Tunisian government to re-enter international capital markets later this year. This guarantee, combined with additional financing from the multilateral development banks, will help Tunisia meet its 2012 financing needs. Work proceeds on a follow-on financing package from the multilateral development banks, including additional sovereign guarantees.

Ah, it took this far reading through the press release and this example to find out that they’re referring to loan guarantees; ie, if the countries can’t pay back loans to banks, we’ll pay the loans for them.  That should give them a great incentive to comply with the terms of the loan!

A New Transition Fund

The five transitioning countries face an urgent need to fundamentally re-orient their economies to address their high levels of unemployment, weak rule of law, and deteriorating public services. The transitioning countries have asked for support to meet these demands, including technical assistance (TA) and grant resources to accelerate innovative reforms. While a wide range of bilateral and multilateral donors currently provide TA, it has not sufficiently addressed the needs of some key areas, in particular economic governance.

No problem–the U.S. and Europe have plenty of money these days to share with you!

Members of the Deauville Partnership have proposed a new, grant-based Transition Fund to help countries implement critical reforms in the areas of: (1) economic governance, (2) trade, investment, and integration, and (3) institutional reform. A new Transition Fund would support a combination of diagnostic analyses, technical advice, and initial implementation of targeted policy initiatives and reforms that have strong demonstration effects. The G-8, regional partners and transition countries are working together to advance this fund. The fund will have broad support from G-8 and Gulf donors, and is expected to be operational later this year.

Multilateral Assistance and IFI Coordination Platform   

 

The IFI Coordination Platform aims to facilitate information sharing and operational dialogue with the Partnership countries, identify opportunities for joint transactions and policy and analytical work, and coordinate monitoring and reporting on the implementation. The IFIs established a dedicated Coordination Platform in advance of the Finance Minister’s Meeting in Marseille on September 10, 2011 to better leverage the collective resources of the ten IFIs that work in the region, with the African Development Bank as the first chair of the rotating secretariat. Since that time, the Partnership has sought to deepen the cooperation among the ten IFIs and between bilateral and IFI assistance.

On April 20, the Partnership called on the ten Partnership IFIs to deliver on their commitments in the short term, particularly in the area of job creation and small and medium enterprise (SME) development. Examples of ways in which the IFIs are providing concrete support to the Partnership countries this year include:

• The provision of development policy loans to Tunisia (African Development Bank and World Bank), Jordan (World Bank), and Morocco (World Bank) underpinning governance, private sector reforms and domestic markets.
• In Tunisia, the African Development Bank is supporting SME credit lines and rural infrastructure to support inclusive growth.
• Support for public-private partnerships through the Arab Financing Facility for Infrastructure, launched last year by the World Bank and Islamic Development Bank.
•  Development of relevant post-secondary education skills in the region through the International Financial Corporation “e4e Initiative for Arab Youth.”
• The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Arab Monetary Fund are cooperating to promote local currency and capital markets in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia.

---

[1] Countries in the Partnership include the five Partnership countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, and Libya), the G-8, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Turkey. The International Financial Institutions include the African Development Bank, the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the Arab Monetary Fund, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the International Monetary Fund, the OPEC Fund for International Development, and the World Bank. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is also a Partnership member.

Of course no numbers are mentioned in the press release.  For what it’s worth, Reuters reports that “The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was also trying to change its charter to create a special fund worth $4 billion to invest in the region over the next three years,” and that the IMF “has said it could provide $35 billion to help emerging Arab democracies.”