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Questions About Jamaat ud Dawa and
UN's Pakistan Aid in Mumbai's Wake
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS,
December 8 -- As arrests for the
Mumbai massacre are being made at the Jamaat ud Dawa camp in Kashmir,
questions
have resurfaced about the UN's engagement with Jamaat ud Dawa following
the
October 2005 Pakistan earthquake. On October 6, 2006 Inner City Press
asked then-UN spokesman
Stephane Dujarric to address reports that the UN worked with both
Jamaat ud
Dawa and the Al Rashid Trust, on the UN's sanctions list. Mr. Dujarric
said
that the UN's focus is on working with and through group who can get
aid to
those who need it. Video here,
from Minute 13:50.
Inner City
Press pursued the issue and
published
a report including a
quote that UN "aid they got from international agencies - have really
boosted their position locally. One Jamaat leader told us that people
were now
trusting them with their children - they hadn't before the earthquake -
and
they had actively recruited hundreds of children left orphaned."
Days later
on October 10, Inner City Press asked the UN's top humanitarian Jan
Egeland about
the reports. Egeland, who still works part-time with the UN, answered
that "I'm sure
we did cover people of many different beliefs and many different
political
orientations. We do not ask hungry people if they do have this or that
political belief... But if you work in Kashmir, there will be people
given aid
who would belong to organizations which have fundamentalist beliefs."
Video here,
from Minute 46.
UN moves supplies into Kashmir in October
2005, Jamaat ud Dawa not shown
As Inner City
Press reported at the time, after the October 10, 2006 press
briefing,
supplemental answers were provided by one of Mr. Egeland's
spokespeople,
Kristen Knutson. Asked how, in the future, OCHA will try to ensure that
it does
not increase the influence of groups like the Al Rashid Trust by
providing aid
to camps they establish, Ms. Knutson insisted that "determining who
can set up a camp is entirely up to governments of member states. And
once a
camp is open, OCHA and the UN will provide aid to the people in that
camp."
So
now, what has
been the UN's engagement with Jamaat ud Dawa? The UN's
New York headquarters was
closed for a holiday on Monday. The issue will continue to be pursued.
News analysis: Giving aid is good,
but so is having standards, or at least being transparent about the
lack of standards.
Footnote: to show
that the issue cuts in many
different ways, while Egeland said that the UN tries not to work with
organization's whose principles vary from those of the UN, last week
Inner City
Press asked current UN spokesperson Michele Montas again about
Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon's agreement with NATO, which was kept confidential
and not
pre-shown even to member states. While the UN is for the abolition of
war, NATO
is a military alignment that, among other things, does not oppose the
use of
nuclear weapons. So what are the UN's
standards for engagements with groups? As we said, it cuts both ways.
Click here for Inner
City Press' November 25 debate on Somalia, politics
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Press Nov. 7 debate on the war in Congo
Watch this site, and this Oct. 2 debate, on
UN, bailout, MDGs
and this October 17 debate, on
Security Council and Obama and the UN.
* * *
These
reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here
for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali
National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
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