It is individuals who commit corruption, usually through a willing and deliberate choice.
‘Do you want the receipts to be legitimate?”
I chuckled at the question but wasn’t surprised. I had just purchased about $1,500 worth of manufactured agricultural products directly from the factory for a small NGO I run in northeastern Syria. I was sitting in the factory’s office, which was bustling with potential customers and workers coming and going. In these situations, it isn’t the corruption that is surprising, it’s how normal it has become, with no hush-hush or backroom whispering. In a room full of strangers, the manager was asking me if I wanted him to doctor the receipts for the NGO so I could take a cut. No one batted an eye.
Given that I founded the NGO and run it as a volunteer, my main thought was that if I did steal this money from the NGO, I would just be making more work for myself, because we would need to do more fundraising to replace the lost money, as we were already cutting it close on the budget needed to finish the project. For me, playing it straight was as much a practical move as a moral choice. But if I were an employee of a large international NGO whose management rarely traveled into Syria, it would have been a great opportunity to pocket a few hundred dollars.
I mentioned this anecdote to a Western employee of a large NGO working in Syria. This person said it validated what they already suspected, that corruption among their local staff was the rule, not the exception. Millions of dollars are pouring into northeast Syria via dozens of international and local NGOs to fund displaced-person camps, infrastructure projects, education and health initiatives, and other needs — urgent or otherwise. Oversight is almost impossible, despite the many checks in place that are meant to prevent corruption or nepotism. The management of these NGOs comes from an array of mostly Western countries, and if they visit Syria, their movements are heavily restricted, and they are usually confined to a compound or villa, allowing for limited interaction with the broader society. Few speak Arabic (or Kurdish or Syriac or any of the other languages used in northeast Syria), and they have little access to information outside of what they are told by their local staff.
This is certainly not to say that Western staff aren’t involved in corruption, or wouldn’t be if they could. And it certainly isn’t to say that all Syrian staff are; I’ve met plenty of dedicated and honest employees of international NGOs. But societal acceptance of corruption in Syria more generally means that it can be very easy to pull the wool over the eyes of their management and find a scheme to make additional money out of their NGO. It can involve fixing receipts, gatekeeping employment opportunities, or directing aid money to relatives or friends. It doesn’t even need to be entirely secret, given how accepted it has become. In northeastern Syria, there is an Arab proverb that says, He who doesn’t steal isn’t a real man (yilli ma ybuug, muu rijjaal). It’s hard to combat corruption when such a mentality, while not shared by everyone, is part of daily life.
The existence of corruption in the Middle East is hardly a secret, and it is widely acknowledged to be a major barrier to economic and political progress. For example, Iraq’s new prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, announced a series of (vague) measures intended to counter corruption during his first speech to parliament after taking office in October 2022. And reports by think tanks and academics abound about corruption. A typical example is a recent report by the London School of Economics, which attributed corruption in Iraq to “poor infrastructure at the peripheries, lack of automated systems, and the networks of collusion between border communities, traders, and customs officials. The assertion of state control in these contexts is thus a matter of technical governance and security improvements.” While these types of reports often acknowledge some cultural or social factor in corruption, it is usually sidelined in favor of proposing a technical solution involving improved systems. These systems, which might increase transparency somewhat, likely reduce corruption at the employee level, but that simply funnels corruption opportunities into more efficient channels to be exploited by those at the top.
Corruption doesn’t always have to involve cooking the books or getting a cut for aid that is supposed to be free. For example, employment with an international (or internationally funded) NGO has become the most lucrative career choice someone in northeast Syria can make. In 2020, I was shown a survey of international NGOs saying that many staff were making over $1,000 per month, compared to government salaries in the northeast, which hover around $150. More recently, an international employee of a large NGO told me that some of their local staff make $2,000 per month. To compare, day laborers in Syria often make about $1 per day. Getting into the NGO sector is so lucrative that those who play any sort of gatekeeper role, formally or otherwise, can and do demand a month’s salary or more in exchange for arranging employment. A Syrian acquaintance, who does not work for an NGO, recently complained to me about this habit, while at the same time I have it on good authority that he demanded the same payoff from someone whom he had recommended for an NGO-funded project.
Sociologist Ali al-Wardi wrote of Iraqis in the 1950s that “each of us criticizes others, and attributes the decimation of the nation to others, forgetting that he has contributed to this public destruction, whether on a large or small scale. It’s strange that employees of the government criticize the government, as if the government is made of people other than themselves, and everyone criticizes ‘the people’ as if he does not belong to the people . . . The low-level employee criticizes his superior for his role in favoritism (wasaatah) even though the low-level employee also practices it.” He might as well have been writing in Syria in 2022.
In another recent incident, two Syrian farmers asked for my help. About a year ago, they explained, the local employee of an international NGO approached them. This NGO worked in removing the landmines that had been laid during Syria’s civil war. This employee had a proposal: The farmers (one of whom doesn’t actually farm but owns some farmland) just needed to say they had found landmines in their field and wanted help clearing them. The NGO was paying farmers to refrain from planting crops while their landmines were removed, and the rate for doing so was about what a farmer could make farming the land in one year, without the risk of a bad crop.
The scheme would work like this: The employee would plant a mine and then bring in the NGO’s field team to verify that there were mines in their field. He would say the farmers had contacted him. The NGO would make a payment to compensate them for not being able to farm, and they would give the employee a cut of the earnings.
Why were they telling me? Because they wanted my help tracking down the NGO. After several Westerners had come and seen the field and the recently planted landmines, and the farmers had left their fields untouched because of the fake danger, the employee had gone silent. They hadn’t seen any money out of the scheme, and were concerned that the employee had somehow taken the whole cut without them. They were wondering if I might know someone who could check and see if the NGO had actually paid the amount; perhaps he fixed the receipts to look like they had been paid. Unfortunately, they didn’t even know the name of the NGO. I apologized, saying I didn’t know anyone who would have that information (which would have been my answer in any case). They seemed genuinely put off that they had been cheated, without seeming to acknowledge that the whole scheme was premised on their cheating an NGO out of funds that should have been used somewhere they were actually needed.
My first experience with corruption in the Middle East was a very simple one. I was in graduate school in Beirut in 2013 and was renting a shared room in a dormitory owned by the Beirut archdiocese of one of Lebanon’s twelve Christian sects. I rented the room for $250 per month, with no set time period when I would stay there. On the contract we wrote five months, but the building manager, whom we’ll call Michel, said it was an arbitrary number that he just needed to write down.
After my first month in the dorm, my Syrian roommate was moving to Germany. I had an offer to move into a nicer apartment with friends for $330 per month. As the roommate was preparing to leave, we were discussing my options. Should I stay where I was and risk a less agreeable roommate? Then I mentioned the price difference: $250 in the dorm versus $330 in the apartment. “How much?” he asked. It turned out he was only paying $200. I asked the manager about the discrepancy, and he said the price difference was because I had committed to only five months in the dorm, while the Syrian had committed for a year. He showed me the paperwork, and it was his word against mine. I was sure he had not told me I could pay $50 less per month by committing to a year.
I was skeptical, so I went to the archdiocese’s office. I found the priest in charge of the multiple dorms they owned and said I was interested in renting a room. I asked about the price, which he said was $200 for a shared room in any of their dorms. No difference for a longer or shorter stay? No, he assured me. I then told him I was actually renting a room already, and was being charged $250. He asked me to bring in my receipt for the first month’s rent, which I did. It seemed that the building manager, Michel, was turning in a different receipt to the archdiocese (for $200 instead of $250) than the one he gave me, and then pocketing the $50. The priest said I would be reimbursed and would pay $200 from then on.
Michel never acknowledged that he had cheated me, saying it was all a big misunderstanding, but he also never lost his job. I told the story to a Lebanese friend, who was sure that the priest was in on it: good cop, bad cop. Once I figured out that I was paying more, Michel became the fall guy, he figured. I was skeptical, but either way, I spent another year waving hello and goodbye to Michel as I came and went from the dorm. Even if the archdiocese was not in on the scheme (I suspect they weren’t), they certainly weren’t concerned enough to fire an employee who was stealing from their residents and fixing receipts.
This was a small-scale scheme, but it was nonetheless treated with impunity. It’s not hard to see that as these things move up the ladder to more influential and powerful people, accountability becomes almost impossible because everyone is implicated. In my little example, Michel could hypothetically have uncovered, say, a massive Ponzi scheme at the archdiocese, but he would be powerless to say anything about it because he had kept his job even after he was caught stealing. Lebanon’s economy and banking system eventually collapsed because the whole country is run in a similar fashion.
Corruption is tearing apart many countries in the Middle East. This issue urgently needs to be confronted. The conundrum is that it almost impossible to tackle, because it is almost unjust to prosecute or punish someone for corruption when everyone else is doing it too. A solution will require a fundamental shift in thinking, an entire overhaul of societal norms. In this case, it becomes a moral issue. In 1958, Ali al-Wardi wrote an article called “Morals” (al-akhlaaq, which can also be translated as ethics), in which he considered the implications of what he called the lost “resource” of Arab morality, equating it to the lack of health care or education in Arab society. “People have come to a consensus,” he wrote in the beginning of the essay, “that diseases in their various forms are an evil that afflicts humanity, and that being safe from them is a good that humans strive toward . . . but they haven’t looked at morals in the same light.” Through the essay he tried to discover what moral shortcomings were plaguing Iraqi society, but he closed by saying that he had “diagnosed the disease without prescribing a medicine.”
And therein lies the difficulty. Much is written about corruption in the Arab world without looking too closely at the cause of that corruption. Is it really the product of a few bad individuals, or is it an ethos that has taken hold across society? From the outside, it can be uncomfortable to criticize such sensitive topics, but Arabs themselves are well aware of these problems. A 2018 reprint of al-Wardi’s “Morals” contained the following note from the publisher: “Arab intellectuals have been shocked by the severity of the conflict in Iraq over the last four years, and many of them have begun studying the causes of this conflict. In doing so, they’ve found the books of al-Wardi to be a resource in helping them understand Iraq’s complicated reality.”
I was recently in Baghdad riding in a taxi as students poured out of a local university. The driver, who was waxing nostalgic about the good old days under Saddam Hussein (a widely shared sentiment, perhaps nowhere more than among the taxi drivers of Erbil and Baghdad), started pointing at students, saying each one was just learning to be another Ali Baba (a thief). “She’s an Ali Baba, he’s an Ali Baba,” he went on. He wasn’t blaming the government or a few bad apples; he was blaming society as a whole.
Any effort to combat corruption in the Arab world needs to recognize a fundamental reality: It is individuals who commit corruption, usually through a willing and deliberate choice. The NGO sector is just one of many examples where corruption has become the norm, but the problem is much broader. It is not a problem that will be fixed merely through better accounting or even a more effective judicial system. It is a social problem that will be resolved only through societal change. Where to begin should be the work of serious Arab thinkers, scholars, and educators. The fact that Ali al-Wardi is experiencing a revival 25 years after his death is evidence that at least some are already starting to look for solutions.