Assad regime profits from chaos

Syrian President Bashar alAssad’s government has benefited from variations in foreign currency exchange rates, boosting its coffers with at least US$100 million (NZ$139m) in international aid money over the last two years, according to new research.

This deprives Syrians, most of them impoverished after a decade of war, of much-needed funds. It also allows the regime to circumvent sanctions enforced by Western countries that hold it responsible for most of the war’s atrocities.

‘‘Western countries ... have become one of the regime’s largest sources of hard currency,’’ said the report, published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC-based research organisation that focuses on international public policy issues.

The authors said the amount of aid lost and diverted to Syrian government coffers as a result of the national currency falling was likely to be more than US$100m over the last two years.

The data they used to calculate the amount was limited to United Nations procurement, and does not include aid delivered through other international aid groups, salaries or cash assistance.

Sara Kayyali, Syria researcher with Human Rights Watch, called the findings shocking. She said aid donors could no longer ignore the fact that they were effectively financing the Syrian government and its human rights abuses.

The Syrian pound has been hit hard by war, corruption, Western sanctions and, more recently, a financial and economic collapse in neighbouring Lebanon.

Syria’s Central Bank, which is sanctioned by the United States

Treasury, obliges international aid agencies to use the official exchange rate – kept at around 1500 Syrian pounds to the US dollar – while the black-market rate has hovered around 4000 pounds to the dollar. The official rate has since been changed to around 2500 to 1, leaving a gap of more than 30 per cent – an automatic loss of about two-thirds of aid funds in the exchange rate transaction, the report said.

Syria’s war, which was sparked by largely peaceful protests in early 2011, has killed between 350,000 and 450,000 people, displaced half of the country’s pre-war population inside and outside Syria, and left infrastructure in ruins. Parts of the country remain under the control of opposition groups and armed rebels.

Aid and rights groups complain that the Assad’s regime has long directed international aid to areas it considers loyal to it, and has used sieges around areas held by the opposition to deny them assistance.