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Brazil's new army chief: the challenges ahead

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By Pablo Scuticchio:

General Eduardo Villas Boas. Photo: Tiago Correa / CMM
General Eduardo Villas Boas. Photo: Tiago Correa / CMM

Earlier this year, Dilma Rousseff replaced the chiefs of the armed forces for the first time as President of Brazil. The most anticipated was her pick for the influential position of Army Commandant. Rousseff’s choice raised a few eyebrows because she broke with the established practice of appointing the most senior officer for the job. It unexpectedly fell to candidate General Eduardo Dias da Costa Villas Bôas, just third in terms of seniority, to lead a fighting force of nearly 190,000 active personnel. With eight years ahead as the most senior commander of Brazil’s military, Villas Bôas will have to address several challenges if he expects to cement Brazil’s status as a major world power.

The first challenge is the budget wars. Facing sluggish growth, mounting inflation and falling investor confidence, President Rousseff appointed University of Chicago-trained economist Joaquim Levy as Finance Minister. Dubbed “Scissor-hands” Levy, budget slashing and austerity measures are the order of the day. General Villas Bôas will have a hard time securing the necessary funds for the Army’s modernisation projects. Its anti-aircraft and cyber-defence systems are outdated. New Astros 2020 multiple rocket launchers and Guarani armoured personnel carriers require billions of dollars until most components can be manufactured locally. Procedures are underway to transform most motorised infantry into mechanised brigades. Border satellite surveillance SISFRON, currently at pilot program phase, is expected to be fully operational by 2021 at a cost of $4.6 billion dollars.

The second challenge is to achieve a reasonable level of inter-operability between Army, Navy, and Air Force. Traditionally, each of the services has been managed as an autonomous fiefdom. Decades with no permanent top-level coordinating organs have generated military branches with a tenuous unity of command. The Ministry of Defence dates from 1999 while the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is an even more recent creation, from 2010. Hardware acquisitions and training are an entirely decentralised affair. Regional ground commanders are hesitant of integrating with Navy and Air Force counterparts, suspecting that the Army might lose its service distinctiveness. Even today, it could be reasonably argued that Brazil runs three parallel armed services.

As leader of Ground Operations Command (COTER), General Villas Bôas has complained that joint training is restricted to annual exercises for junior officers and sporadic division-level war games. Partly to address this issue, the Ministry of Defence is already planning to expand the magnitude of land-based Operação Amazônia and seaborne Operação Atlântico.

Brazil’s sudden shift towards inter-operability springs from the 2008 National Strategy of Defence (NSD); which represented the first ever concerted effort between civilian and military officers in developing a viable national defence strategy. It is based on the premise that Brazil requires reasonable levels of territorial security before it can play a larger role in global affairs.

The NSD recognises that Brazil might face a hostile extra-regional power or alliance of superior military strength (a not so discreet reference to either the United States or NATO) encroaching on its borderland and seaways. In such a scenario, an Army retaining a frontal-assault and concentration of firepower model from the World War II era – the last time Brazil saw full-scale military action – would prove unsuccessful. It would lack the necessary agility for exploiting brief windows of opportunity and vulnerabilities presented by an adversary in mid-power projection. What the NSD envisions is a fighting force capable of carrying out decentralised operations. To prevail in such a scenario, the NSD recognises that both joint strategic planning at the top and tactical coordination at the theater of operations level are essential. How this ambitious scheme can be achieved without even the existence of a joint force training centre is unclear.

Finally, the Army faces the arduous challenge of overhauling its defence perimeter. Since independence in the 19th century, Brazil’s main rival has been Argentina, its southern neighbour. As a result, most of its combat units were located close to the Argentine border. Yet by the turn of the 20th century the countries were close partners, causing Brasilia’s defence priorities to shift.

Heavily influenced by Michael T. Klare’s resource war literature, civilian and military policymakers identified the Amazon rainforest, covering most of the centre and north of the country, as a major defence liability. They worry that its petroleum deposits and mineral wealth might attract unwarranted attention from foreign powers. Worse still, they believe that Brazilian military capabilities situated in the isolated Amazonian region are not up to the task of defending the area because they remain scattered and inchoate. Villas Bôas has gone on record saying that the Amazon “is not integrated with the rest of the country” and that current budgetary allocations for armed forces in the area are inadequate.

To rectify this shortcoming, the NSD suggests that the Army must strengthen its presence in the Amazonian region. Relocation of military units from the south, the activation of a new Northern Military Command and the creation of more jungle infantry battalions are among the policies put forward. However, institutional inertia is not easily reversed. The Army’s budget process is in a balancing act between complying with the NSD Amazon refocus guidelines and funding its pet acquisition projects.

As former chief of the 1st Jungle Infantry Battalion and the Amazonian Command, Villas Bôas breaks with a tradition of Army chiefs who made their careers in the south and the east of the country. Displaying a clear understanding of NSD defence priorities, his appointment suggests that Brazil’s army might be on the cusp of a transformation.

Pablo Scuticchio is an International Politics graduate student at San Andrés University in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is interested in Latin American defence and strategic studies. He can be reached at pscuticchio@gmail.com.

Chad: Taking the lead in the war on Boko Haram

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By David Bruckmeier: 

Idriss Deby, President of Chad. Photo: Rama
Chad’s President Idriss Déby. Photo: Rama 2010

Chad has emerged as a key player in the war against Islamist group Boko Haram. The liberation of the Nigerian town of Gamboru by Chadian troops on February 3 is the latest example of the Central African country’s increasing assertiveness in regional security matters. Beyond fears of a spillover of the violence to his own country, President Idriss Déby is seeking to establish Chad as a regional force and bolster his own power by making himself an indispensable partner in the fight against terrorism.

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The ground offensive in Gamboru, in which over 200 Boko Haram fighters were reportedly killed, followed several days of air raids against the militants and is the latest in a string of successful strikes by Chad against the Islamist group. As Boko Haram has stepped up its attacks in recent weeks, so Chad has stepped up its military presence in neighbouring countries: Chadian troops now operate in Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria. On 29 January, Chadian forces drove the Islamists out of the Nigerian town of Malum Fatori after attacking their positions from across the border in Niger. In mid-January, Chad deployed its military to Cameroon to assist its neighbour in fending off Boko Haram’s incursion into its territory and recapture Baga, the Nigerian border town ravaged in a massacre earlier that month.

It is unclear whether Nigeria had been consulted before Chad’s advances into its territory. Statements by Nigeria’s defence spokesman following reports of Chad’s recapture of Baga suggest that the Nigerian government was caught off guard. The very fact that Nigerian officials had to point out that Chad’s interventions did not constitute a violation of Nigeria’s sovereignty speaks of the unease many in the country feel with Chad’s growing influence. Although Nigeria was quick to emphasise the two countries’ close cooperation in the fight against the Islamist group, Chad’s unilateralism puts Nigeria in an awkward position, as it lays bare the weakness of the African behemoth’s own response to Boko Haram and its partners’ lack of confidence in its ability to solve the conflict.

Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan has been accused of underestimating the threat posed by Boko Haram, allowing a localised rebellion to develop into an insurgency that threatens to destabilise the entire Lake Chad region. When nearly 300 girls were abducted from a school in Nigeria’s Borno State in April 2014, it took the government nearly three weeks to acknowledge that the kidnapping was not a conspiracy fabricated by political rivals. In early January, Chad temporarily pulled its forces from the regional military coalition against Boko Haram, in part over frustrations with its partners’ lack of action. It has since pledged troops to a new multinational joint task force (MJTF) backed by the African Union, but has not wasted any time waiting for it to become operational.

Chad’s President Idriss Déby is increasingly nervous that the conflict, which has claimed over 13,000 lives in north-eastern Nigeria and recently spread into northern Cameroon, may spill over into Chad. Its capital N’Djamena sits right at the border with both countries. Chad is already feeling the heat from the developments in its neighbourhood: thousands of Nigerian and Cameroonian refugees have fled to Chad in the wake of the recent attacks, and in a video message released on 20 January, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau explicitly threatened attacks on Nigeria’s neighbours. Many of Boko Haram’s fighters are ethnic Kanuri from Chad. With the greatest threats to Déby’s power traditionally having come from foreign-backed Chadian rebels, he is keen to keep them at a distance. It is understood that he supported the Séléka rebels that ousted François Bozizé, then president of the Central African Republic (CAR), in 2013. Many of the Séléka rebels were former Chadian and Sudanese fighters involved in the failed 2006 and 2008 rebellions, and Déby may have been supporting them in CAR in an attempt to move them away from the Chad-CAR border region where they had fled after the rebellions.

Moreover, the Lake Chad Basin holds significant, largely untapped oil reserves. Chad’s oil production has surged in recent years, and the country hopes to double output by 2016. If Boko Haram makes inroads in Chad, these ambitions, and Déby’s presidency, could be put in danger. Oil revenues have helped build one of Africa’s most potent militaries, crucial to the staying in power of one of Africa’s longest-serving rulers whom some regard as a dictator.

Déby himself rose to the presidency with French assistance in a coup in 1990 and has survived several Sudanese-backed attempts to overthrow him. By promoting his country as an anchor of stability in a region mired in conflict and taking the lead in the war on Islamist terror, he hopes to secure regional and international support and legitimise his ambitions of staying in office beyond the end of his term in 2016. As so often, then, the issue comes down to a trade-off between stability and democracy.

His strategy seems to be bearing fruit: in an earlier display of its military muscle, Chad’s army contributed substantially to France’s 2013 Operation Serval against Islamist rebels in northern Mali, earning it much praise for its efficiency and professionalism. In return, France provides Chad with military assistance and has chosen N’Djamena as the headquarters of Operation Barkhane, its permanent counter-terrorism operation in the Sahel region. France has come to Déby’s aid before. With the Sahel shifting back into the focus of French Africa policy and Chad’s resolute engagement in the war against Islamist terrorism, France has a strong interest in keeping its closest ally in the region in power. Likewise, Chad’s neighbours may grind their teeth at its unilateralist leanings, but its military strength makes them dependent on it for their security.

Chad’s recent interventions against Boko Haram mark a breakthrough in the fight against Boko Haram. Although arguably motivated more by President Déby’s survival instinct than solidarity with its neighbours, Chad’s determined military action has substantially weakened the militants. However, it is clear that a long-term solution to the conflict is only possible if its underlying causes are addressed – the disenfranchisement of the Nigerian electorate from the country’s elites, particularly in the underdeveloped northeast, massive regional inequalities, as well as religious and ethnic divisions. These are all issues that only Nigeria itself can tackle.

Crucially, though, Chad’s action is putting pressure on neighbouring countries to follow suit and may serve as a wake-up call to Nigerian voters and politicians ahead of the presidential elections on February 14. For Chad itself, its new role will likely have the opposite effect. As Déby’s power grows, so shrink the prospects for a peaceful transition of his country to democracy and a fairer distribution of oil revenues in the near future.

David Bruckmeier is an MA Student in International Relations at King’s College London. He is particularly interested in African affairs.

Understanding digital intelligence from a British perspective

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By Professor Sir David Omand GCB:

GCHQ building at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Photo: Ministry of Defence (creative commons)
GCHQ building at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Photo: Ministry of Defence (creative commons)

The Snowden revelations revealed much that was never intended to be public. But to understand them they must be seen in their context, of a dynamic interaction over the last few years between the demand for intelligence on the threats to society and the potential supply of relevant intelligence from digital sources. All intelligence communities, large and small, and including those hostile to our interests, have been facing this set of challenges and opportunities.

First, the challenge of meeting insistent demands for secret intelligence. For the UK this is, for example, to counter cyber security threats and provide actionable intelligence about the identities, associations, location, movements, financing and intentions of terrorists, especially after 9/11, as well as dictators, , insurgents, and cyber-, narco- and other criminal gangs. The threats such people represent are real and – in many respects – getting worse and spreading.

These demands for intelligence have coincided with a digital revolution in the way we communicate and store information. The internet is a transformative technology, but is only viable because our personal information can be harvested by the private sector, monetized and used for marketing. So the digital age is able to supply intelligence about people, for example by accessing digital communications, social media and digital databases of personal information. And for intelligence communities, new methods of supply call forth new demands from the police and security authorities that could not have been met before the digital age. And their insistent demands for intelligence to keep us safe call forth ever more ingenious ways of extracting intelligence from digital sources.

For the democracies (but not for others such as the Russians and Chinese), there is an essential third force in operation: applying the safeguards needed to ensure ethical behaviour in accordance with modern views of human rights, including respect for personal privacy. For the UK, the legal framework for GCHQ is given in:

  1. The Intelligence Services Act 1994 (Article 3 confers on GCHQ the functions of intelligence-gathering and information assurance with the sole purposes of national security, prevention and detection of serious crime and safeguarding the economic well-being of the UK from actions of persons overseas; Article 4 relates to obtaining and disclosing information).
  2. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act 2000 (Article 1 outlines the terms of unlawful interception; Article 5 outlines the powers of the Secretary of State to issue a warrant to make interception legal); Article 8 describes domestic and external warrants; Articles 15 and 16 provide safeguards and controls on storage, handling and retention of data).
  3. The Human Rights Act 1998 including incorporating a ‘necessity and proportionality’ test to everything GCHQ does.

Like some elementary experiment in mechanics the resultant of these three forces – of demand, of supply and of legal constraints and public attitudes – will determine the future path of our intelligence communities.

Into that force-field blundered the idealistic Edward Snowden, the Wikileaks-supporting information campaigners Poitras and Greenwald, plus a posse of respectable journalists.

Some are tempted to see Snowden as a whistleblower. But he certainly did not meet the three essential conditions for a legitimate whistleblower as far as the UK is concerned.   He did not expose UK wrongdoing, he did not exhaust his remedies before going public, and he did not act proportionately by stealing and leaking so many secrets (including 58,000 British intelligence top-secret documents) to make his main case against the US National Security Agency’s collection of metadata on the communications of US citizens.

Close examination has shown that there is no scandal over illegal interception, or other unlawful intelligence activity, by GCHQ. The three elements of the ‘triple lock’ on GCHQ’s activities – the Foreign Secretary’s authorisations, the oversight by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), and the legal compliance by the independent UK Interception Commissioner and the independent Investigative Powers Tribunal – have each separately concluded everything GCHQ does is properly authorized, and legally properly justified including under Article 8 of the European Human Rights convention regarding personal privacy.

The documents from these different oversight bodies are well worth reading for the unparalleled detail they provide into how interception by the UK authorities is authorized, carried out and audited so as to be always within the law:

  1. The ISC Report.
  2. The Interception Commissioner’s Annual Report for 2013.
  3. The Investigative Powers Tribunal Judgement.
  4. The Foreign Secretary’s Statement.
  5. The Home Secretary has also described her role in authorizing legal interception of UK communications, including by GCHQ, here.

The inescapable conclusion from these documents is that GCHQ operates entirely within the law, including the 1998 Human Rights Act and therefore the European Charter of Human Rights in respect of freedom of expression and personal privacy.

What the documents do reveal is bulk access to the internet (authorized under Section 8(4) of RIPA 2000) in order to be able to reconstruct communications whose packets have been sent on different routes and to discover new communications of targets (who, to avoid surveillance, will adopt different identities). Targeted surveillance is what is conducted by the UK intelligence agencies. They will continue to need to try to collect intelligence on authorized targets for which the necessary legal authority exists, for example jihadist extremists from the UK who are fighting in Syria and Iraq and who may return to the UK as hardened and dangerous terrorists.

What Snowden and his supporters have failed to do therefore is to distinguish bulk access by computers to the internet – which the US and UK, France, Germany, Sweden and many other nations certainly do have – and so-called ‘mass surveillance’. Mass surveillance implies observers – human beings – who are monitoring the population or a large part of it. As the ISC, the UK Interception Commissioner and the IPT confirm, no such mass surveillance takes place by GCHQ; it would be unlawful if it did.

A similar misconception has arisen over the use of so-called metadata. The media have not explained that the UK uses a strict legal definition of ‘communications data’ (laid down in RIPA 2000) which covers the traditional ‘who called whom, for how long, when and where?’ of old-fashioned telephone billing, not the much looser concept of ‘meta-data’ obtained from internet and social media use. Thus accessing browsing history or other detailed digital metadata, whether from US or UK sources, is for British analysts equivalent to accessing ‘content’ which requires the relevant UK warrant signed by a Secretary of State. For domestic communications (both ends in the UK) that is the Home Secretary and for communications with one or both ends overseas by the Foreign Secretary.

Given the packet-switched nature of global internet communications it is possible that a domestic communication will be picked up in the course of overseas interception – but RIPA 2000 makes explicit provision to allow for this possibility, and provides safeguards (Sections 15 and 16) to ensure the same level of authorization is obtained.

So the issue is not the powerful tools themselves; they are necessary for public and national security. Nor is it the legality of how these tools are used today. The issue is how we the public can be sure that under any future government these tools cannot be misused.

We would be well advised not to have blind trust in the benevolence of any government. ‘Trust but verify’ should be the motto. With increasingly robust executive, Parliamentary and judicial oversight and publication of the results of their work we can and must ensure those tools will only be used in lawful ways that do not infringe beyond reasonable necessity our right to privacy for personal and family life or impose unconscionable moral hazard.

Professor Sir David Omand GCB is a visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”. For seven years he served on the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that Director of GCHQ. During the Falklands conflict he was Principal Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary, and he served for three years in NATO Brussels as the UK Defence Counsellor. 

 

Charlie Hebdo: defending more than one narrative

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By Fernanda A. Marín:

Heads of State marching through Paris after the Charlie Bebdo attacks. Photo: European External Action (creative commons)
Heads of State marching through Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Photo: European External Action (creative commons)

I wasn’t lucky enough to be present at the latest demonstration in support of the “Je suis Charlie” movement, in solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attack in Paris that happened just under a month ago. I saw how all my friends living in Paris took out their pens and marched across the streets of their city to claim that freedom of speech would not be taken away from them with bullets and fear. I wanted to be there with them, marching by their side; but for different reasons.

Before I continue, I would like to be clear on two things: first, of course I believe in freedom of expression; and second, I am more than upset for the lives lost during the attack. Nonetheless, seeing this event simply as an attack on freedom of expression and French solidarity and unity would be too simplistic. This attack goes beyond the right to mock whoever we want, and it goes beyond the religion each of us is free to practice.

I refuse to believe in a simplistic narrative that portrays the shooting as an attack on French freedom of expression due to rising Islamic fundamentalism. The event is far more complex than mainstream media has led us to believe. The causes include a complex history of racial and religious tension and deep problems of integration that date back to the independence of Algeria, a former French colony.

Areas of Paris are stigmatized for their large migrant populations. This has led to the marginalisation of a Muslim population of 6 million. Almost 70% of French citizens say Muslims have failed to integrate into society, but the truth is that the country makes no effort to welcome them in, and the worst part is that we were all well aware of it. It was a ticking bomb waiting to explode. So the problem French society is now facing did not start the day of the shootings; it has evolved over many decades. This situation is getting worse, and it is something that we should all care about. This is why…

The question of censorship: should we have the right to mock religion?

Many have pointed out the parallels between Charlie Hebdo’s content and the anti-Semitic cartoons of 1930’s Germany. Those who defend the magazine claim that foreigners don’t understand the humour, and that freedom of expression is a fundamental right of any democracy. So having the right to mock whoever we want should never be censored. Nonetheless, an article by Jason Stanley in the New York Times made an interesting point about satire within societies where a minority feels oppressed. He claims that mocking the Pope is not the same as mocking Muhammad because Catholics (or at least Christians) are the overwhelming majority in France. The underlying tensions go beyond simple cartoons, but the cartoons serve to crystalize the feeling of many Muslims that they are an object of ridicule in French society.

So, going back to the original question, should there be a restriction of freedom of expression? No, absolutely not, but if we are to understand why those drawings had the power to create so much anger, we should not focus on the cartoons per se, but the society in which they are published. In other words, we should not blame the cartoonists, but try to understand the readers.

From the march to the paradox

When over 50 heads of state came to Paris to march next to François Hollande to make a stand for unity and freedom of expression, it’s more than European solidarity that made them take the journey. France, the country with the largest Muslim population in the EU, has just become the European guinea-pig for tackling these sorts of problems. If it succumbs to inter-communal tensions and political extremism, the rest of Europe will fear the experiment has failed.

The ‘threat of radical Islam’, increasing islamophobia and the rising popularity of extreme-right parties with openly xenophobic rhetoric is old news. However, the most painful irony of the killings in Paris is that it has helped radicalize fragile societies across Europe, creating further tension and violence. Furthermore it has given far-right parties ‘excuses’ to legitimize their racist and xenophobic policies.

Sadly, this movement to ‘defend freedom of speech’ has once again become a political tool. It has just fanned the flames of the so-called ‘war on terror’. Several countries are using this to increase security measures and reduce privacy. The UK and Australia are the clearest examples. David Cameron has called for additional powers in response to the attacks in Paris, despite the fact that the authorities already had the attackers on their books under the current regulations. In a speech given three weeks ago, he claimed that there should be no means of communication that authorities cannot access. This explicitly referred to encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp and Snapchat no longer functioning with their current privacy terms and conditions.

This has all backfired on us. And we are allowing it. This freedom of speech and tolerance discourse is actually leading us towards the loss of our privacy rights and the rise of xenophobic parties. Quite the irony, isn’t it?

Fernanda A. Marín is a Master’s student in International Security at Sciences Po, Paris. 

Financing Terror, Part IV: Charities and terrorism in the Middle East

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By Drew Alyeshmerni:

Rockets fired from gaza by the military wing of Hamas. Photo: Zoriah (creative commons)
Rockets fired from the Gaza Strip by the military wing of Hamas. Photo: Zoriah (creative commons)

In Judaism, it’s tzedakah. In Islam, it’s zakat. In Christianity, it’s tithing. Each major religion sees the importance of giving charity, whether for the sake of doing good or as a religious obligation. Other influences on an individual’s propensity for charitable donations include political affiliation, religion, race, sexual orientation, country of origin, interests or concerns.

Charities provide local or international assistance and are often regulated by government entities such as the Internal Revenue Service in the United States and the Charity Commission1 in the United Kingdom. These organisations try to make sure that charities operating in conflict zones do not have ties to terrorism. Charities diverting money towards terrorist groups has happened in the Syrian Civil War and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Due to the large number of local and international organizations raising funds for Syrian relief efforts, the Charity Commission issued an alert in April 2013 titled ‘Safer Giving Advice for Syria’. Their concerns have proved prescient. In February 2014, British citizen Abdul Waheed Majid joined an aid convoy heading to Aleppo with the Birmingham-based ‘Children in Deen’ organization. While in Syria, he abandoned his convoy, joined the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front, and drove a truck full of explosives into a prison wall. His suicide mission – partially funded by unsuspecting individuals’ charitable contributions – caused dozens of civilian deaths and allowed hundreds of dangerous prisoners to escape.2

Events such as Majid’s suicide mission have sparked great concern over the destination of funds raised by charities who claim to be doing humanitarian work but are actually directly or indirectly supporting terrorist groups. Since February 2014, the Charity Commission has opened an investigation into 86 aid groups suspected of supporting extremists, including 37 charities involved in providing aid to war-torn Syria.3 In addition to Children in Deen, these charities include Aid Convoy, Syria Aid, and Al-Fatiha Global. The investigations are still underway and dozens of other charities are being monitored for their fundraising activities in the UK.4

This phenomenon – the use of charities as funding fronts for terrorist activities – is not new. After the September 11, 2001, attacks the United States government initiated the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) in order to identify, track and pursue terrorist groups’ sources of funding.5 Through the TFTP, the US government has uncovered and shut down over 40 designated charities used as Potential Fundraising Front Organizations, or PFFOs.6 In August 2010 the US entered a TFTP agreement with the European Union.7 This agreement enables the sharing of intelligence between the US and the EU, although there are limits to the efficiency of the US in preventing the flow of funds to terrorist organizations. Prime examples of these limits are the attitudes and actions by other countries against organizations such as Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organization that operates throughout the Levant, Israel, and the Palestinian territories.

Charitable organizations identified as PFFOs for Hamas in the US are not designated as such in the EU and UK. One such organization is Interpal, the Palestinian Relief and Development Fund. Interpal, a UK-based charity, is allegedly designed to hide the flow of money to Hamas.8 According to the US Treasury, Hamas raises tens of millions of dollars per year throughout the world by using charitable fundraising as a cover.9

While Hamas supports a wide array of humanitarian projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, their work is also a primary recruiting tool for the organization’s military wing,10 which is responsible for carrying out acts of terrorism against Israel. These include the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens, the firing of 11,000 rockets since 2005 upon southern Israel’s civilians, and the use of cross-border tunnels to carry out attacks within Israel. In stark contrast to the findings of ongoing investigations into organizations feared to be funding terrorist operations in Syria, the UK’s Charity Commission claims that Interpal does not support terrorism.11 Additionally, the EU has actually removed Hamas from its list of designated terrorist organizations.12

What is the effectiveness then of the Charity Commission’s policy aimed at eradicating the abuse of charitable organizations by Syrian-based terror groups when potential fundraising front organizations for other groups such as Hamas, still considered a terrorist organisation in countries such as Egypt and the United States, are allowed to freely operate on British and European soil?

In the case of Hamas and Interpal, the joint EU-US TFTP agreement and system of checks erected in the UK’s Charity Act of 2006 to audit charities suspected of abuse are proving to be tools influenced by public opinion surrounding the political climate on any given day. In the case of the few dozen Syrian-linked charities in the UK being investigated by the Charity Commission, one has to wonder if the only reason they are being investigated is because of the intense publicity surrounding events that relate Syria to Britain, like Majid’s suicide mission, the beheading of a British aid worker, and the migration of 500 British jihadists to the Islamic State. Would those charities have even been flagged for review if not for these events? And if not for these events, would the Islamic State or the al-Nusra Front have been considered terrorist organizations, or would they have been considered nationalist liberation organizations for the Sunnis of the Middle East, much like Hamas for the Palestinians? The point is that public opinion seems to determine the policy of those organisations charged with investigating charities suspected of funding terrorist groups.

After exploring these two different cases in Syria and Palestine, we must ask ourselves the following questions: Are the policies used to oversee and investigate charities indeed founded on justice, or are they simply based on political interest and public opinion? Is it important for individual donors to do their due diligence when determining where to make their international charitable contributions, or must donors simply put their trust in governmental bodies that may potentially be influenced by politics and public opinion?

In order to ensure that your charitable contributions go directly to supporting the cause you care about, dig a little deeper with your research. Look at other countries’ information on charities to which you are considering making a contribution, and consider whether there is a correlation between the activities of such charities and the operations of terrorist organizations. Your generosity is surely heartfelt, but unless you do the necessary research, you may unwittingly be supporting a cause other than the one you intended.

Drew Alyeshmerni has an MA in Public Policy from Tel Aviv University and certification in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona. While in Israel she coordinated international humanitarian aid projects for the Palestinian population of the West Bank under the Civil Administration and worked in a variety of Human Rights groups, including the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, Hiddush: Freedom of Religion for Israel, and the Center for Jewish Arab Economic Development. Drew currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where she focuses on reconciliation between Arabs and Jews on college campuses. Find her on LinkedIn. 

This article was the final part of a Strife series on terrorist financing. Over the last four weeks authors have examined different methods of terrorist financing, using modern and varied case studies, offering a new look at who and what is funding today’s terror activities. In Part I Arne Holverscheid discussed the role of private Kuwaiti donors in financing rebel groups in Syria affiliated with terror organisations and blurring the lines between good and bad, friend and foe. In Part II Claire Mennessier examined the involvement of Pakistan in financing terror groups, and the motivations and challenges presented by this involvement. Last week, in Part III, Samuel Smith addressed the frightening trend of kidnapping for ransom as a source of finance for terror groups through a case study of the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

NOTES

1 The Charity Commission is responsible for registering eligible charitable organisations in the United Kingdom and investigating cases of malpractice or misconduct by charitable organisations. See the following page for further information: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/charity-commission/about

2 Sophie Jane Evans, “Investigation Launched into Birmingham Charity Used by ‘British Suicide Bomber’ to Travel to Syria and Carry out Attack,” Mail Online, March 3, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2571460/Children-Deen-used-British-suicide-bomber-travel-Syria-carry-attack.html.

3 Tim Ross et al., “Charity Commission: British Charities Investigated for Terror Risk,” The Telegraph, November 1, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11203569/Charity-Commission-British-charities-investigated-for-terror-links.html

4 Ibid

5 “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP),” U.S. Department of Treasury, May 5, 2014, http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit-finance/Terrorist-Finance-Tracking/Pages/tftp.aspx.

6 “Protecting Charitable Organizations – E ,” U.S. Department of Treasury, August 21, 2007, http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit-finance/Pages/protecting-charities_execorder_13224-e.aspx .

7 “Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme,” European Commission, December 12, 2014, http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/crisis-and-terrorism/tftp/index_en.htm.

8 “Protecting Charitable Organizations – E” – Listed under Interpal

9 ibid- listed under H- Hamas Fundraising

10 ibid -Listed under H- Hamas Fundraising

11“UK Charity Commission: Interpal Not Supporting Terror Groups,” Charity and Security Network, April 9, 2009, http://www.charityandsecurity.org/news/UK_Charity_Commission_Interpal_Not%20Supporting_Terror.

12“EU court takes Hamas off terrorist organisations list,” BBC, December 17, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-30511569