Q&A: ASI program head speaks out on Syria aid scandal

LONDON — One of the United Kingdom government’s main aid contractors, Adam Smith International, is under fire again. This week, investigative TV show BBC Panorama aired a documentary accusing the implementer of failing to tackle corruption in an aid program it runs in Syria, and alleging that a small portion of funds had reached the hands of a terrorist group, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, after being extracted from the Free Syria Police — an unarmed civilian police force that the program supports. Panorama also claims that FSP officers cooperated with courts involved in human rights abuses, and that two of their officers were present when two women were stoned to death. ASI, which implements the Access to Justice and Community Security, or AJACS, program on behalf of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, denies the allegations, claiming the journalists behind the documentary took events out of context and misrepresented the risks faced by aid organizations working in complex environments such as northern Syria. It says the stoning incident took place just five weeks after it started running the project and that the two officers in question were not normally linked to the scheme. Donors to the program, including the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany suspended the program on Monday while they investigate the claims. In a separate incident earlier this year, ASI voluntarily withdrew from bidding on new Department for International Development contracts following allegations in the Daily Mail newspaper that it had falsified parliamentary testimony and misused proprietary information, although it continued implementing contracts it had already won. DFID later cleared ASI of wrongdoing. The AJACS program has been funded through the cross-government Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, which contains a mix of official development assistance and non-ODA resources and is housed in the FCO. Many of the programs that fall under its remit walk a line between traditional development and security operations. CSSF has quadrupled its budget since it was created in 2001 as the Conflict Pool, now standing at 1.2 billion pounds ($1.62 billion) per year, due in large part to the U.K. government’s ongoing effort to spend more aid through departments other than DFID. The effort has seen mixed results, and some aid experts worry about the “militarization” of aid and the subsequent risk posed to frontline aid professionals if their work is seen to be carrying military or political motives. Yet because ASI, which continues to field criticism from the U.K. media for its profit-bearing business model, remains one of the CSSF’s key implementers, it has situated itself at the precarious center of some of the most controversial — and most ambitious — U.K. aid experiments: For-profit development; cross-government aid spending; and the blending of security and aid objectives. David Robson, head of the AJACS program at ASI, traveled to the organization’s headquarters in London from the program’s regional base in Gazientep, Turkey, in order to deal with the suspension and investigation. He spoke to Devex about the accusations; how ASI, CSSF and FCO approach risk in conflict-affected environments; and how donor and implementer are handling the suspension, both on the ground and in the media. The conversation here has been edited for length and clarity. Could you start by explaining the connection between the AJACS program, the FSP and the allegations from BBC Panorama? The bulk of AJACS programming is in support of the Free Syria Police. We're the only program and our donors are the only donors that provide support to that community police force. All of the material that the BBC has provided is either false, or unsubstantiated, or misrepresented. When you look at the individual allegations, all the material there was known to us and known to our donors and had been discussed with them. Clear, rational decisions have been taken on how to proceed with the donors based on the facts and based on the risk. So the whole thing was taken out of context unfortunately and demonstrated a deep lack of understanding of the Syrian context and how programs are run. How did you approach the risks of operating in northern Syria in the program design? The program is designed to operate in a very high-risk environment. We are the largest player in the security and justice sector in opposition areas in Syria, so by design you have a program here that has a number of layers of governance that sits over it; a very careful risk management system and process; and also an independent third party monitor contracted by the donors to act as a backstop. Part of the purpose of the program is to counter violent extremism. You would expect there to be contact between the Free Syria Police and those [proscribed terrorist] groups and that is very carefully managed on a day-to-day basis. The FSP understand what the limitations of donor support are; they understand what things are acceptable or not acceptable to donors; and they know they themselves have an extraordinarily high satisfaction rating amongst the population, more than 80 percent of whom describe them as their most trusted security provider. In the show, it is alleged that ASI at one point recommended to the FCO that funding be cut from one of the programs where money was reaching Zenki. Can you explain why ASI recommended that funding be cut for those activities? Zenki, at the time we engaged with them, was not a proscribed [terrorist] organization. And we have known, and we have discussed with the donors, that Zenki has a very tight control over civil administration in the areas in which it is dominant. Zenki was interfering with the payments of stipends to FSP officers. When we presented to the donors that we'd been unable as a program, with the help of the FSP, to prevent the interference, we said ‘we think you should consider suspending support.’ Their response was, quite rightly, that there was still an opportunity to press back. Rather than pulling back programming from areas under their control — because again they were not proscribed at the time — they wanted to have a final go, if you like, at making sure Zenki were unable to interfere any longer. So they as donors engaged directly with the leadership of Zenki. That engagement was successful. Zenki interference was ended and and we were able to continue supporting the FSP stations in those areas. It says in the TV program that funding for those activities was eventually stopped after 10 months. Why? Eventually, the circumstances changed dramatically. You'll recall at the start of this year, Zenki had a sort of marriage of convenience with Jabhat al Sham to form Haya'at Tahrir al Sham. In fact, they weren't proscribed until May of this year. So from a programming perspective, in terms of risk, we now had a completely different organisation to deal with and therefore we suspended support to the stations in question as a precautionary measure. We were then able to follow up as the dust settled over that merger and restart programming again in some of the locations, because Zenki was not dominant in those particular areas. The other stations remain closed, despite the fact that Zenki has now left Tahrir al Sham. The [TV show] was conflating all sorts of different issues and demonstrating its lack of understanding of what was going on at this time and that donors were making these decisions. The payments that reached Zenki, were those bribes, facilitation payments, or something else you could have foreseen in the program design? No, they weren’t bribes. The money was intended to go straight to police officers’ stipends. The fact Zenki was getting in the way of those payments, and taking from them, was completely unacceptable, which is why it was dealt with the way it was. The way that our verification processes work, we were then able to track — once we got Zenki’s hand out of the till — that the officers’ stipends were being received by the officers. So no there was never any intention, and there was certainly never any agreement, formal or informal, that this was acceptable conduct from Zenki. Are there formal or informal arrangements between aid implementers and armed groups in Syria to pay bribes or facilitation payments? It’s not the case that we have to pay any bribes. Because of the environment and also the beneficiaries, we’re able to operate because FSP have got the support of the population. In these communities, the police don’t drive out an armed group, an education program doesn’t, a governance program doesn’t; but when you layer those things together, you get a community that’s able to look after itself without armed group interference. The armed groups, they’re not the right group to be delivering government services. They tend to be extractive, they’re not welcome, they bring violence and weapons into a community. What we give the community is the tools to push back on those armed groups, to drive them out to the edge. Was there anything that should have been done differently, from ASI's point of view, to better mitigate the risk? Something that should have been accounted for but wasn't? “When things do go wrong, as they do, we need to be able to catch it quickly as we do, talk that through with the donors, make a decision with them and get the problem sorted.” --— David Robson, head of the AJACS program at ASI Anybody that claims their program is completely fault free and that there’s nothing to learn in the development space is either deluded or just plain lying. We meet challenges every single day. The extremist groups we’re up against, they don’t sit by watching idly, and watch a program that is a direct threat to their aspiration to control security, they don’t just sit by and let us do it. They actively try to undermine what is going on, and we have to constantly adapt to that. That means that when things do go wrong, as they do, we need to be able to catch it quickly as we do, talk that through with the donors, make a decision with them and get the problem sorted. The evidence that we produced to Panorama shows exactly that in progress, where an armed group will make a move that we didn’t anticipate, and we dealt with it effectively with the donors. Every day is a school day in Syria, that’s for sure. Can you explain why this program was funded by CSSF and FCO rather than DFID? It was the security aspect of the program that meant that the FCO took the lead on this rather than DFID, and it's the same for the [other] government donors, where it's the ministries of foreign affairs leading. In terms of quality of accountability and oversight, does it differ from the perspective of the implementer, between FCO and DFID? There is no difference in terms of a departmental approach. The oversight is based on the way that the program is designed, what the governance structure is and what the risks involved are. So it's very much to do with the environment that you're operating in rather than any difference between two government departments. There's been some criticism that oversight of CSSF programs is opaque — that it’s sometimes hard to discern a central source of information about their programs. What's your perspective as an implementer? I've worked on CSSF programs continuously for the last five years. From an implementer perspective, I don't think we have any difficulties at all with CSSF, how it's governed or run. If there are issues with the way that government departments are presenting transparent information to the public, that is something that you probably would have to take up with each department, but from our perspective it's worked extremely well. Given the security focus, what’s the appetite for risk within the CSSF over another fund or department in the government? Risk is assessed against the benefit that you're going to achieve. It is all to do with the operational environment and asking, given what you're trying to deliver or what outputs and outcomes you want: Are the the risks going to be manageable between the implementer, the donor, and indeed our beneficiaries in the field? Clearly for a program that is required to try to counter the malign influence of these [terrorist] groups then a greater degree of risk is going to be present. Therefore, the management of that risk is going to have to be layered and have to be under greater scrutiny than it would for a more traditional aid program. What’s missing from the conversation we are having with the public about risk, coming from donors and government departments delivering aid? “What might look simple from a distance, is absolutely not the case on the ground and you end up dealing with layer upon layer of complexity and challenge.” --— I think that's quite difficult to deal with. As all of us know, any of us working in the development field, what might look black and white, what might look simple from a distance, is absolutely not the case on the ground and you end up dealing with layer upon layer of complexity and challenge. Without a detailed understanding of the situation it's very difficult to understand sometimes why certain risks were tolerated, why some risks were treated, and you know you can’t give a simple and quick description to somebody who is reading a newspaper, who doesn't understand what's happening in Somaliland or Myanmar. It’s a really difficult thing to do because it can't be dealt with in a sound bite. What would you like to see change in the way donors talk about risk to the public? I think that there is a case with being more robust in the way that our programs are defended by governments … I've always found it more effective to come back robustly and say, yes there was a problem, yes there was an amount of cash lost or whatever the issue is. But that was tolerated in terms of the construct of the program, the way that the risks were designed to be managed, because the benefits that you were achieving were worth these small losses or these small setbacks. I think that there seems to be a reluctance to come back hard and say no, we were right, you know, we made decisions based on the full facts that were available to us, and we stand by those decisions. How has FCO got involved in the process? How have they shown their support? Of course politics affect everything, and when you look at our six donor governments they’ve all got a number of different challenges to deal with, and therefore they’ve handled this in the way they needed to. In terms of our dialogue with each of them, that’s been continuous and very close. I speak to the donors almost every day, we meet them formally every single fortnight to go through program decisions and risks and so on. Just in the last week, as we’ve been providing responses to the BBC, they’ve of course been shared with our donors as well. We’ve met with them on a conference call basis just about every 48 hours, as we come through this, to make sure they were comfortable and informed of what we were doing. At the beginning of the program, was there an expectation that a certain percentage would be lost? Does it come down to those concrete numbers and is there an effort to cost them into the budget? No, it’s more nebulous than that. The aspiration of course is no loss whatsoever. And that is the way that we believe the risk management system is set up to try to prevent any loss. There's no figure set, it's not costed that a given level of loss is acceptable. Each of the circumstances, each of the engagements, each decision is taken on its merits, on the understanding that there could be some financial loss or some damage to reputation if we're getting it wrong. Is that wise to approach it with zero costing of risk, and an expectation that there won't be any loss? There are a couple of things that I would argue do make it wise. Firstly, I think anything that laid down a risk framework that says it's acceptable to lose X amount of money to a proscribed organization, I think that would be extremely difficult to explain to the public. So the way that it's done is there’s a discussion, because all of the cases are complex, they're all different — every community that we go into is the subject of an exchange of research work and a debate over the pros and cons of doing it. Each of those decisions is taken on its merits and then we work very hard to manage those risks. We constantly discuss the risks with our donors and I think the net results, certainly in the case of our program, is that they've been managed extremely well. What is the status now of the program in terms of funding? What exactly has been suspended and what will be affected as a result? Because the allegations that Panorama were making were extremely serious, our donor governments made the decision that it would be prudent to suspend activity inside Syria and therefore funding going into Syria for the short period it's going to take to investigate the allegations. So there was a suspension of program activity in order to make sure that the allegations were answered properly in an investigation by both us and our donors. I spoke to the donors and we had a discussion over the implications of the broadcast [on Tuesday]. We gave our view, they gave us theirs, and then told us that they were about to make recommendations to capitals over whether the suspension would stay in place or not. I’m not going to tell you what the recommendations are, or speculate about whether or when funding will be resumed. Can you tell me whether the recommendation was unanimous among the donors? Their recommendations were unanimous, yes. As a program, we are hopeful. Can you talk a bit about the impact of a suspension, even for a few days — what does that do on the ground? How does that affect beneficiaries? Clearly it does affect beneficiaries in terms of the financial support we provide, training, equipment. And of course also to pay our own field officers inside Syria. At the point activity was suspended, all of those financial movements were suspended. The Free Syria Police themselves, you have almost 3,400 officers who are delivering support to 1.5 million people, and therefore their attitude has been that we will ride this out, we will continue to deliver support where it's needed, and we trust you AJACS to go and fix the problem. The field officers’ attitudes have been exactly the same. There comes a limit of course. It's very difficult to put a timeline on that but inevitably the impact of not being able to provide financial support, equipment, to be able to repair police cars has an impact over time, absolutely. What’s the nature of the impact over time if it goes more than a few days? It does risk security because of course the Free Syria Police are there as an unarmed and accountable policing force, which allows the communities to push back on the armed groups. If the civilian-led policing service is able to operate and deliver services in the community then it doesn't leave space for the armed groups to do that. The longer you leave the FSP without support, the more risk there is that the armed groups are going to push them to one side and take that role themselves. How many people are relying on this money for their salaries or living stipends? In terms of FSP there are currently 3,388 officers that we support in Aleppo, Idlib and Daraa province with stipends, operational costs, equipment and training. Of our own field staff, we have 83 that are logistics, research, finance officers and engineers implementing the program inside Syria. What’s been your experience of this ordeal? Is there a protocol to handle these kinds of media debacles? We didn’t have a protocol to handle this. As challenges are met in the program, they’re met in consultation with the donors; but this one, you know, it was a surprise that an organization like the BBC would adopt a tactic like this that threatened support to the very moderate actors that they were claiming were not. It’s been a challenging couple of weeks, for sure. Mostly, of course, for our beneficiaries and our team inside Syria. For all of us it’s been a very disappointing episode, and one that we are confident is going to be over very soon. Update, Dec. 11: This article was amended to clarify that ASI has not yet resumed bidding on new DFID contracts. For more U.K. news, views and analysis visit the Future of DFID series page, follow @devex on Twitter and tweet using the hashtag #FutureofDFID.