FRANCAISInternational Islamic Relief Organisation of Saudi Arabia (al-Ighata al-Islamiya al-'alamiya) - Comments
4) Public Relations
-From 1991 until 1996, the IIRO published some annual reports. Until 1998, it also handed out a quarterly newsletter in English. Since then, the opacity of the organization contributed a lot to its bad reputation. On its website in 2007, the IIRO only gave information about the amount of its expenditures, but not about the origin of its financial resources. The figures published in Saudi riyals were huge and unrealistic, up to 1.9 billion of Euros in 2005-2006!
-Based on a militant, fundamentalist and even warlike proselytism, the IIRO tried to propagate the teaching of a rigorist Wahhabi Islam. Like the Gideons with the Bible in the United States, the NGO distributed many Korans and religious literature, including videotapes of Ahmed Deedat, an aggressive Islamist preacher from South Africa. Through its educative structures, the IIRO specially targeted isolated children and claimed to take care of 38,000 orphans in 44 countries in 2006, as compared to 83,000 in 58 in 1996. According to its website in 2007, this sector represented 97% of the expenditures of the organization, against 2% for the teaching of the Koran and less than 1% for health, education, civil engineering, community projects and nutrition. The word “orphan”, explains Xavier Pauly, should be understood in a quite broad sense here, for it includes youth who lost the “head” of their household, i.e. their father but not necessarily their mother. As far as adults are concerned, the IIRO mostly tried to re-islamize “bad” Muslims perverted by paganism in Africa or a western way of life in Europe. As far as we know, the NGO has not tried to convert Christians. On the other hand, it clearly used humanitarian aid to discriminate against infidels or dissenters. Thus, its volunteers refused to help women who were not veiled, as well as men who drank alcohol, did not have a beard and did not go to the mosque. The most recalcitrant were abandoned to their sad fate. In Jomvu in the suburb of Mombassa on the Kenyan coast for instance, the IIRO withdrew from a Somali refugees camp in 1994 because its dwellers, some fishermen called Bajun, followed the Sufi tradition and rejected the Wahhabi ideology.
