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The UN: Just What the US Needs
By maudeaster on 2008-10-20 09:37:21
When last week's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Finnish diplomat Ahtisaari, remarked he was proudest of his peacemaking
efforts as the UN representative negotiating independence for Namibia, I was flooded with memories. My mother was a
reporter at the UN in New York, very committed to covering the stories of countries often invisible in the US. As a teen in
the 1960s, my eyes were opened by meeting people she interviewed, people leading struggles for independence across the
world. The petitioners at the UN from what is now Namibia gave particularly heart-rending accounts of repression and their
need for independence. When Namibia became a new nation, I was excited by the conflict-resolution role the UN had
played. As staff of a Quaker program in the late 1970's, I had the opportunity to travel to both South and North Korea.
Seeking information from a wide range of sources on how the US could play a more constructive role on the divided
peninsula, I was thrilled to discover the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) worked on both sides of the border
and had great ideas on the kind of tension-reducing cross-border efforts that have since developed. This reinforced my
feeling that the UN has a unique ability to identify the common ground so essential to conflict resolution. For a couple of
decades I did work quite unrelated to US foreign policy, but was always shocked by news that conservative US senators and
presidents had successfully made the US one of the few countries not to ratify a wide range of UN-developed treaties, from
the Convention on the Rights of the Child to the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Law of the Sea. I felt increasingly during this
period that, by these actions, the US was isolating itself dangerously from needed international frameworks. So, in 1999 I
lept at the chance to sharpen my understanding of how the complex UN agency world works -- and how the US might
strengthen its relationship with it -- by spending 2 years in Geneva, Switzerland, the European center for the UN and the
headquarters of numerous UN agencies, including the Human Rights Commission, the Refugee Commission and UNAIDS.
Using skills I'd developed lobbying the NYS legislature, I learned by working for 2 organizations advocating with the UN
agencies -- first for the needs of sexually abused children, and later for the rights of the world's mushrooming population of
migrating workers and their families. It was an eye-opening experience. Time after time I met UN staff back in Geneva
between overwhelming assignments, setting up emergency assistance for millions of refugees, creating educational
programs for thousands of demobilized child soldiers, helping national governments develop large-scale village programs
for HIV-AIDS prevention, etc -- usually in physically difficult and dangerous settings. At the policy level, the Human Rights
Commission was developing strategies for dealing with modern forms of slavery and organizing a global conference on
racism and zenophobia. UNICEF was creating new global program approaches based on the exciting learning that
prioritizing assistance to women is the most effective way to strengthen a entire family's well-being. The UN agencies were
clearly addressing some of the world's most critical problems. Of course, neither the programs nor the policies were perfect.
The programs needed many more resources, and, as in any institution, not everything ran according to plan. But the
commitment and the framework of the UN approach transcended narrow, national self-interest and were based on the idea
that global progress and security depend on recognizing basic human rights everywhere - to health, food, shelter and
education - and on preventing both conflicts and failed states. The UN agencies involved governments in consensus
decision-making and worked for solutions with regional benefits. Their work complements the efforts of the UN
Peacekeeping missions, active in 63 conflict areas to date. If you have been reading my other blog posts, you will know I see
this election as an opportunity for the US to change direction in how we relate to the rest of the world. I truly hope that we
will embrace the UN as an indispensable part of a new foreign policy agenda.
