The NOREF foundation held secret meetings with Hamas. Document revealed that NOREF also holds secret meetings with the Palestinian Authority, without Norwegian authorities being present. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will not answer questions about what NOREF is doing. But it is financed by Norwegian taxpayers.
NOREF Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution is an independent, government-appointed foundation with a secret agenda. For 18 years, it has arranged secret meetings. The focus is Palestine. Each year, its activities cost NOK 64 million from the development aid budget. Since its establishment in 2008, these activities have cost Norwegian taxpayers NOK 716 million.
Last year’s salary costs came to almost NOK 39 million, divided among 29 employees. In addition came almost NOK 29 million in other operating expenses. According to the accounts, revenues were NOK 67 million, three million more than the development aid funding.
On its website, it writes ‘Resolving conflicts through informal diplomacy’. When the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is contacted with specific questions about NOREF, no answers are provided. Responses to enquiries to NOREF are non-committal, and the head of the organisation, former senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs official and ambassador Johan Vibe, does not respond. Document therefore finds grounds to describe the organisation’s agenda as secret.
On 16 August, Document wrote about the revelation in The Times of Israel, which revealed that NOREF had held a secret meeting with the terrorist organisation Hamas in 2021.
Following this meeting, official Norwegian development aid to Palestine soared. From having stood at just under NOK 700 million a year, Norwegian aid to Palestine reached no less than NOK 1.7 billion last year.
On 26 February this year, Document revealed that NOREF also holds secret meetings with the Palestinian Authority, without Norwegian authorities being present.
When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is now in his 22nd year as president, visited Norway on 12 February this year, another secret meeting took place at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. The participants were Abbas’s closest adviser, Majdi Khaldi; retired senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs official and close friend of Terje Rød-Larsen, Geir O. Pedersen; and NOREF director Johan Vibe. No official representatives of the Norwegian authorities were present. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been shown the photograph and asked what the meeting was about. Document has received no answer. Nor has it received one following the revelation in The Times of Israel.
NOK 716 million worth of secrecy
‘NOREF was established in 2008 as an independent foundation, at the initiative of the Norwegian authorities. NOREF’s mission is to create initiatives and help parties to conflicts prevent, mitigate and resolve conflicts’, states the press release issued by NOREF in connection with Johan Vibe taking up his post last year.
NOREF was founded in 2008, while Jonas Gahr Støre was Minister of Foreign Affairs. That same year, it received more than NOK 10 million from the development aid budget. Since then, the amount has increased considerably, and was raised to an entirely new level after the Støre government took office.
Aid through NOREF has reached a new record under Støre.
In total, NOREF has received NOK 716 million from the development aid budget since 2008.
When one tries to look more closely at what the money has been spent on, and where, information is sparse. According to Norad’s website, the development aid funds transferred to NOREF have gone towards ‘conflict resolution and prevention’. When one uses Norad’s sorting function to determine where the money has gone geographically, the answer is the general category ‘global unspecified’.
In the article ‘Development aid increased to more than NOK 10,000 per inhabitant’, we showed that more than half of the development aid budget ends up in this unspecified category.
Salaries and travel
The NOREF organisation has 29 employees, including the organisation’s former director, former NUPI researcher and former State Secretary to Jonas Gahr Støre, Henrik Thune.
More than half of the development aid funds that go to NOREF are spent on paying employees’ salaries. This means an average salary level of more than NOK 1.3 million a year. As a government-appointed foundation, its employees will benefit from the terms of the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund (Statens Pensjonskasse), even though the organisation itself describes itself as ‘independent’.
The other major expense item in the accounts, ‘other operating expenses’, amounting to almost NOK 29 million, is assumed by Document to cover travel, food and accommodation around the world in connection with the secret meetings.
From the outside, it appears that the board and the organisation more generally serve as fallback positions for employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NUPI and other state bodies and organisations.
