Time Lord: Heeding our Hourglass of Sustainability, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Jul

Now the time has come. There’s no place to run.   Chambers Brothers

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.  Andy Warhol

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.  Kurt Vonnegut

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.  Mother Theresa

The future is uncertain but the end is always near.  Jim Morrison

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.  Neil Gaiman

Time moves slowly but passes quickly.  Alice Walker

In an earlier phase of the work of our small organization, we were preoccupied with the development of an Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS), a rapid-response, gender-inclusive mechanism under UN auspices which could respond rapidly and effectively to threats of genocide and other mass atrocities. UNEPS was designed to combat abuses which our current system of conflict response is still unable to address at sufficiently early stages to prevent the long-term damage – to families and communities, to farms and civilian infrastructure – which remain as a horrific legacy of so much armed violence and gross rights violations in our current, famine-stricken, gun-saturated world.

Despite some of the large and unwieldy egos which congregated around this initiative, and despite some persistent disputes over the contingent size and funding mechanisms for such a force, the underlying premises of UNEPS remained sound.  It recognized that where response to grave violence and other crises is concerned, time is always of the essence.  Prevention is always preferable to resolution in the conflict sphere, and our collective record on matters of prevention is not yet particularly laudable.  But once a looming crisis is recognized, there is – or should be – no time to waste.  When dealing with threats of mass violence, delay means death and misery.  Moreover, the longer a conflict is allowed to fester, the more elusive a negotiated peace or even an adopted cease fire tends to become. 

With UNEPS, we often used the analogy of firefighting in our outreach, as firefighters are acutely aware of the need to arrive at fire scenes rapidly and with capacity adequate to the blaze.  Any delay in response merely intensifies the threat to both citizens and firefighters, and often ensures that a fire that might have easily been contained turns into a blaze that scorches thousands of acres and uproots life both human and animal.  The same logic applies during injury car crashes or when a mother recognizes that her child’s illness is more than a garden-variety cold.  In these or other circumstance, emergency response is not a luxury but a priority, one which gives the sick and injured the best chance of a full recovery.

While there is no UNEPS incarnate in the world , the UN system and several of its regional partners have taken on board the importance of rapid reaction, including in both peacekeeping operations (where late arrival endangers civilians and complicates peace prospects) and disaster risk response (where early warning combined with even earlier preparations gives communities the best chance of surviving more frequent, violent storms and other climate shocks). But the UN is also hampered by fungible timelines largely dependent on the will of member states: the will to agree on resolution language with measurable impact; the will to fund the structures and personnel needed to make prevention viable; the will to honor multilateral commitments through dedicated national implementation strategies; the will to ensure an end to impunity for abuses as the best means for preventing their recurrence.  

To spend as much time as we do in UN discussions and processes is to participate in a twilight zone of urgency and delay, a place where crises are recognized but invariably subject to the vicissitudes of extended and often intense negotiation, wherein states have the space, if they choose to use it, to both join the consensus on crisis language and impede the consensus on crisis response.  We see elements of this “zone” evident in our pandemic response where practical (and funded) responses to the urgent need for “vaccine equity” still fall well-short of our rhetoric.  We also see elements of this in the willingness of states to pat themselves on the back for their virtuous commitments to the alleviation of famine and other global threats, commitments which are often not honored in full (and at times not even in part) and which, in any event, represent only small percentages of what we liberally allocate for mass casualty weapons, fossil fuel exploration and other civilization-threatening investments.  

What we don’t see nearly as often as we would wish is sufficient progress towards what Kenya’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Security Council this past Friday called “an architecture of shared burdens,” a multilateral system made up of what she called “capable states” that both protect their own citizens and contribute more of their national skills and capacities to the global commons. 

What else might be implied by this notion of “capable?” In part it refers to states which understand, as DSG Amina Mohammed noted in several venues this week, that the success of our world depends on our ability to localize key commitments, to promote public involvement rather than more state control, to invest in the skills and capacities needed to make our responses to conflict and other global crises more than token, more than piecemeal.  “Capable” states recognize when their policies are actually “pushing” people further behind, as noted this week by a Bangladesh professor.  Capable states acknowledge, as Niger recently confessed, that our humanitarian responsibilities are often invoked to “remedy the shortcomings” of our human community, that so much of the “need” we seek to address is the product of conflict and climate threats we could do much more to prevent.  Capable states also recognize that what the president of ECOSOC referred to as our current “prefect storm” of economic, heath and environmental challenges cannot be resolved in isolation or half-heartedly, nor can we delude ourselves that time alone will heal what we must commit much more to heal ourselves.  Capable states know that they must model the norms and behaviors that they seek to promote in others, that an architecture of shared burdens cannot be built on the backs of states which themselves decline to share or which insist on talking more than listening or, for that matter, acting.  

And capable states know that our collective clock is ticking, our global hourglass is quickly draining its sand, the metaphorical wolves we have ourselves brought into being are making ample progress in bringing our very house down. Despite some stunning technologies and many hopeful local initiatives, we have allowed threats to our present to flare largely out of control and we can hardly miss their effects in the form of flooding and fires, unprecedented levels of heat and intensity of storms, and a global community that seems often to be in meltdown mode, eager to attack and reluctant to share, eager to exploit and reluctant to respect, eager to withdraw and reluctant to protect.

Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram was right this week to point to a “emerging global consensus” on debt relief, universal vaccination, women’s participation, climate mitigation and adaptation, and ending the digital divide, elements of a consensus that he did much to promote during his ECOSOC presidency and his stewardship of this year’s High Level Political Forum (HLPF). And yet the Ministerial Declaration from the recently adjourned HLPF is a testament as much to the politics of the UN as to an active consensus that can reassure communities in need or distress that their trust in multilateralism remains well-founded.

The representative of Slovenia, speaking on behalf of the European Union, acknowledged as much.  Despite helping to beat back amendments to the declaration (proposed mostly by Russia) that would have stymied references to matters as fundamental (to us) as human rights, gender equality and biodiversity protection, the EU statement lamented the absence of a more “action-oriented” document which takes ample responsibility for “building back greener” and vigorously preparing our global society to prevent and address the “future shocks” which are virtually certain to come our way.

And perhaps also to reference in clear and unambiguous terms that the future envisioned in 2015 at the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals is a long way from realization; and that as a result there is now literally “nowhere to run” from the ubiquitous drought and pandemic variants; from the heatwaves that now stretch to the Arctic and the deadly flooding which impacts communities across the so-called developed world; from the food insecurity that is quickly becoming a discouraging global norm and the violent outbursts from people with malevolent intent or who simply, if mistakenly, see no other pathway to express themselves.

As we learned from our own, uneven UNEPS experience, sound policy is about more than saying the right things but is about ensuring timely and capable response to threats which, as we now see in this global moment, are only becoming harder to tame.  Despite some good efforts at global level underscored by innovative technology and abundant data, we often seem “trapped in the amber of the moment.” Our hourglass has almost drained, and yet we continue to squander precious time to demonstrate the courage and cooperation needed to free ourselves and our constituents from our largely self-imposed constraints. Time may seem to move slowly, but our chance at a sustainable future is passing much too quickly. We cannot allow another moment to drain away. Let us begin in greater earnest to reverse current trends while the opportunity to do so still beckons.

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Brave Heart: A Mindset for Sustainable Development, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Jul
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Solidarity isn’t merely a task, it is a pleasure and the best assurance of security.  Erich Fromm

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life.  Veronica Roth

For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.  James Baldwin

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.  Mark Twain

Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations. Chandra Talpade Mohanty

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.  Richard Rorty

In a week that witnessed renewals of armed violence, assassination attempts and successes, and heat excesses oozing from virtually every pore of the earth’s membrane, the UN met in the context of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) to consider a way forward on our lagging sustainable development (SDG) commitments.

In largely virtual formats, figures of global prominence from government, private investment houses, universities and a bevy of civil society organizations shared their sense of what was possible to achieve now given a world still struggling with COVID-19 variants and vaccine inequities. Despite the constraints imposed by time and (occasionally) technology, several plenary discussions and (especially) side events made substantial contributions to our search for a common, viable way forward on issues from poverty and governance to food security and climate change, reminding us of the struggles of the moment but also summoning us to take bolder steps, to embrace bolder measures, to build a healthier, more sustainable world while the opportunity to do so still presents itself.

As one might imagine, the pandemic occupied center-stage, with the Foreign Minister of Barbados reminding the opening session of the HLPF that vaccine access (the “what”) is key to allowing tourism-based economies in the Caribbean and elsewhere to at least begin to recover.  But in a theme recurring throughout the week, the “how” of equitable vaccine distribution and access remained elusive.  As that same session, the World Health Organization’s Dr. Tedros chimed in that in the absence of “local health security,” global health security and other SDG commitments will surely remain “off track.” But Tedros also highlighted “profound gaps of sharing” in our world and urged efforts towards a “pandemic treaty” to identify and address new pathogens before they are allowed to replicate the current levels of social and economic ruin to which many government officials this week consistently pointed.

As others also reminded the digital UN audience, the current pandemic might be the most recent, major impediment to SDG implementation, but it is hardly the only one. Indeed, as OXFAM’s director and others made clear, the tendency to “privilege private wealth over the public good” was in force well before the pandemic.  COVID-19 did not create the food insecurity that ravages millions under threat from climate change and armed violence.  It did not invent what was noted throughout the week as the “shrinking civic space” which endangers journalists and civil society leaders alike and allows disinformation to flourish.  It did not create pervasive discriminations of race and culture which Costa Rica’s Ambassador Chan noted perpetuates the existence of “second class citizens” and impedes progress towards equality, let alone genuine “equity.”  And it certainly did not invent the gross inequalities of power and income which have only grown more grotesque during the pandemic.  As noted by the World Food Program’s David Beasley, as many as 41 million people in our world are now facing grave food insecurity which could be alleviated if we could only find the $6 billion dollars to do so, a mere 0.2% of the $28.7 trillion dollars in global wealth generated last year despite pandemic limitations. 

The pandemic, as many have noted this week, has also become a “cover” of sorts for steps that we know we need to take but now have an “excuse” not to do so.   Many during the HLPF, including VP of the Economic and Social Council, Mexico’s Ambassador Sandoval, called again for urgent action on matters from “decent work” to “full digital connectivity” which have long been on the UN agenda. Beyond the HLPF, a discussion this week, in the General Assembly on the UN’s global counter-terror strategy yielded insights from many, including from the Malaysian representative who advocated for the creation of “mental firewalls” against the growing (and equally well-known) ability of extremists to radicalize its youth.  Terrorists have not taken time off during this pandemic, as many delegations noted, but our responses to these threats, as Afghanistan warned, have largely remained “static.”

So what do we do now?  How do we move from the “what” that we well know to the “how” which continues to elude us in more than a few key areas of sustainable development and which is more urgent with each passing day, let alone with each passing HLPF?  What is missing in our individual and collective approaches? To reiterate, we know that we have agendas of longstanding, some of which have become more severe during the pandemic, and which require urgent and practical attention.  We know that we must do more to eliminate corruption and illicit financial flows.  We also know that we must do more to open avenues of concessional finance and relieve the debt burdens of the small island and least developed states, to respond to the call of Seychelles president RamKalawan for assistance on problems that “everyone knows exist” and for which “we should not have to beg on our knees.”  We know that we need to push back harder on violence against children and schools, on our stubborn digital divides, on disinformation by climate and COVID deniers, on threats to progress on rights for women, persons with disabilities and cultural minorities, on the seductive messaging of terror groups, on trade-related and other regulations that continue to privilege the privileged.  And we know, as Italy’s Minister intoned, that we have an obligation to “rethink” governance and public institutions at all levels, ensuring that we can sustain peacebuilding in conflict and climate-affected states and create “people-centered justice systems” which have a real chance to ensure accountability for the grave crimes which we continue to perpetuate against one another.

It is a large agenda, as large as the SDGs themselves, a test for the global community unlike any we have taken on in our history.  And it will continue to require more from each of us, including the will to renounce what Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram (ECOSOC president) referred to as “wishful thinking,” the belief that these problems will somehow resolve themselves without deep and effective partnership-based policies.   A similar theme was invoked by South African during the HLPF side event on racial discrimination, reminding us that laws “can only go so far” towards the eradication of racism in the absence of complementary, supportive social structures.

And complementary, supportive peoples.  Those of you who still read these posts surely know where this is going – a plea for bravery and solidarity to embrace the challenges of the moment, challenges that will do us in unless we find in ourselves and each other the energies and capacities needed to reverse a bevy of current, worrying trends.

Fortunately, the HLPF seems to have embraced this need as well.  This week, Under-Secretary Liu advocated a “global response plan” for the pandemic.  UNICEF’s director Fore urged a “shared purpose” to enhance the welfare of children now suffering in multiple ways.  The IMF’s Managing Director Georgieva invoked the need for “bravery to move towards the light” and stay focused in our pursuit of sustainable development.  Dr. Tedros and many others called for a narrowing of our “sharing gaps.” Costa Rica’s Chan highlighted the benefits of pluralism, noting that “each new culture introduced, each new language spoken, makes us richer.” Tunisia expressed the hope that a recent Security Council agreement on Syria humanitarian assistance reflects a fresh and “common will” to resolve conflict and related political impasses. And Mexico’s Sandoval aptly summarized a trend across this HLPF, noting that there is “big hope for the world if human solidarity prevails!”

One could well ask, What is going on here?  It seems that the mindset much conducive to multilateralism is coming out of a bit of hibernation in helpful and productive ways.  Yes, there is hope for the world if solidarity prevails.  Yes, there is hope for the world if we all take responsibility for fixing what we can, healing who we can, and doing both by reaching out to others for whom the “essential blocks of social protection” are blocks we largely have in common.  Beyond resolutions and legal frameworks, beyond the stale rhetoric sometimes characteristic of UN spaces, virtual and otherwise, such hopeful solidarity requires a different type of bravery, a different breed of investment, a commitment to hearts and minds more open, honest and engaged than we have allowed them to be in quite some time; a commitment as well to pick up the pace of our often “slow walk” towards a better life, to address challenges at the speed and in the multiplicity of forms in which they now appear to us.

Let’s run with this one before we change our minds, before we return to that space where physical courage is abundant but moral courage is rare, before we frighten ourselves into inertia by the energy and “grit” needed to generate “alternative destinations,” create greater solidarity with the entire natural order, and dare speak the truths we know to speak.  As Fromm suggests, solidarity may well be a pleasure, but it is also key to our security in a world where security for many millions is clearly at a premium.  To grasp it, we must dare to grasp each other, to brave the holding of hands and affirm in practical terms the interconnectivity which lies at the heart of all life, including our own.

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Internal Medicine: The Progress on Peace We Make and Need, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Jul

Follow and improve the light before the darkness overtakes you.  John Fox

Knowing is not enough; we must apply.   Leonardo da Vinci

Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you’re digging out the victims of an avalanche. Douglas Coupland

Get it right today, for today will never come again.  Seyi Ayoola

You cannot prove your worth by bylines and busyness.  Katelyn S. Irons

Don’t forget that people are dying in hundreds every day, hurry up, don’t take time. Abraham Guesh

The last quote from Abraham Guesh was one of dozens of comments posted on our twitter feed to our reporting on Friday’s Security Council discussion on the complex situation which has long been unfolding in Tigray.  At this meeting, called by the US and hosted by France, UN Secretariat briefers highlighted the multi-polar politics and dire, violence-inflamed humanitarian needs experienced by many people living in this northernmost part of Ethiopia. For us, but much more for our commenters, it was largely a discouraging session.

In the Chamber, sharp differences on how the Council should proceed on Tigray, indeed even if the Council should proceed at all, were major takeaways from this session.  The Ambassadors of Russia and China were insistent that, with due recognition of the need for humanitarian assistance and “political dialogue, Tigray was essentially an “internal matter” for the government of Ethiopia and its self-selected African and global partners to work out. China specifically expressed the concern that a failure of the Council to carefully “calibrate” response would run the risk of “making matters worse” in a place where “worse” is, quite frankly, a bit challenging to fathom.

For others on the Council, the impacts on the people of Tigray from eight long months of violent clashes, climate change, locust plagues and other threats of existential proportions were of primary concern.   Led by the delegations of Ireland and Kenya, a focus was on urgently addressing what is now a longstanding humanitarian catastrophe as well as on the “tools” both within and outside the African continent that can be utilized to promote an end to the conflict and then, once peace is restored, more effectively help that region “heal from violence and deprivation.”

But as is the case with many sessions in this genre, it was not at all clear how or if the full Council was prepared to “hurry up” and do its part to open those pathways to healing.  The US Ambassador, hosting a press briefing prior to the formal Council meeting, alleged value in letting conflict parties in Tigray know that “they are being watched.”  Fair enough, but since when does “watching” in and of itself deter the violent abuses which are the precursor to humanitarian disaster?  The Council is ostensibly “watching” abuses unfold in Syria, in Yemen, in Myanmar, in Palestine, in Libya, even in Cameroon.  Is there reason to contend that Council “watchfulness” causes abusers to pull back, to reconsider, even to modulate their aggressions?   And if not, are there other internal measures that we might be overlooking (or misusing) that can address violence at earlier stages without, as China noted, “making matters worse?”

Following this Council meeting on Tigray, our twitter account literally exploded with commentary from Africans that in some ways mirrored the Council discussion itself.  Some were highly supportive of Ethiopian government actions and expressly thanked the Russians for having their back and affirming the “internal” nature of the conflict.  Others pointed to what they (and not without reason) interpret as a full-on genocide to which the international community has, at best, been slow to respond.   Still others focused attention on the access needed to more quickly and effectively alleviate humanitarian miseries which have festered and intensified over many weeks while also creating waves of human displacement, mostly into the Sudan.  Some even raised the prospect of political independence for Tigray.

Amidst this cacophony of political and humanitarian concerns and remedial options, the common threads of response were on the need for peace and the urgency of global action.  Even those touting the “internal” nature of this dispute understood that recovery and reconstruction will require assistance from beyond national borders.  The politics of conflict may often be internal, but the consequences of conflict are not, including in the form of displaced lives and ruined infrastructure. Moreover, what does “urgency” mean to a conflict which is 8 months old and many more months in the making?  If peace is the condition for effective humanitarian response, and speaker after speaker at this Council meeting (and on our twitter feed) affirmed as much, how can we better overcome the Council’s internal political divisions in order to respond more effectively and rapidly to escalating political conflicts within member states that continue to set off fires with deadly consequences across the world?

More and more, it seems, there are two factors at work which are in parallel creating unfathomable heartbreak for communities and credibility issues for the UN.  One, as already noted, is the tendency to see conflicts as “internal matters” that Council decisions cannot resolve but can make worse.  The other matter is related to existing levels of trust, trust that members of the Council are able and willing to put their own national political interests aside to do what is best for states on the verge (or in the midst) of conflict, that they are as committed to delivering on peace as they seem to be on ensuring humanitarian assistance when the peace, yet again and for a variety of reasons, fails to hold. It is also important to note in this context that Ethiopia is only one of many African states tiring of seemingly endless Council deliberations on African peace and security which to some smacks of a fresh and unwelcome iteration of colonial interference, despite claims by former colonial powers and other intervention-minded states that they are now “honest brokers” on peace which they surely have not always been in prior times.

Earlier on Friday, at the Integration Segment of the Economic and Social Council,  the Vice-President of ECOSOC, Ambassador Sandoval of Mexico, delivered some kind and hopeful remarks seeking to remind his UN colleagues that our policy “must have a human face,” and that we must commit in practical terms to whatever changes we need to make in order to deliver on our promises to sustainable development, promises which are not only focused on poverty reduction, water access and food security, but on forms of governance (including at the UN) that can deliver on the protection of human rights, the provision of justice, and the promotion of peace, and to do so with proper levels of thoughtfulness and urgency,  We are not always digging out bodies under avalanches, metaphorically-speaking, but there is much misery in our world, most all of it existing beyond our policy bubbles, and we must ensure that our delivery architecture at national and global levels remains ready and able to prevent crises or at least address them in the shortest possible time-frames, certainly shorter than the 8 months the people of Tigray have been crying for relief.  

But the membership of ECOSOC knows, as indeed we all should recognize, the extent to which the silencing of guns is indispensable to the fulfilling of other commitments to sustainable development and successful humanitarian access.  Members equally recognize that given current levels of armed threat, stoked in part by what appears to be growing levels of global distrust in the motives of our institutional system of security maintenance, it is no small matter to enable conflict hotspots to be allowed to cool, and to ensure that the coals of conflict are thoroughly raked such that a recurrence of armed violence is no longer an option.  But this is our job. This is how we have chosen to earn our keep.

To my mind, such tasks are largely internal affairs, not in the jurisdictional sense but in the cultural one.  As we push states (and offer them capacity support) to honor Charter commitments including to the protection of their citizens, our multilateral system and especially its Security Council must discern how to “prove its worth” to an increasingly incredulous global community, including to a growing number of states within the body of the UN.  It must also discern how to engage states on their protection responsibilities in ways that do not undermine national and regional efforts nor pour flammable liquid on already raging fires.  And it must be able to demonstrate, as a matter of its own internal growth, that the faces of conflict victims, the sounds of despair as lives and communities are ravaged, are essential to policy progress in ways that national politics and personal careers simply are not.

Indeed, as a matter of principle and accountability, we must all work in our various contexts to “improve the light” such that the darkness of violence afflicting too many in our world can finally be lifted. This is why we’re here.  This is why we have made the choices we’re made.  This is what we have given threatened constituencies a right to expect of us, that despite our own internal limitations we are determined to get peace “right” and that we are determined to get it right today, the only day that really matters to children and families, in Tigray and elsewhere, attempting to survive under a dark cloud of armed threat.

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Irregular Times: Narrowing the Rhetoric-Delivery Gap, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Jun
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An irregular heart beat

So many distractions, when all she wanted was silence, so she could understand what was going on. Rehan Khan

It seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.  George Eliot

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. C.S. Lewis

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.  Robert A. Heinlein

But can we dispel “unusefulness” as worthless? For some, art and play may be “useless” but yet are fundamental ways and means for survival. Erik Pevernagie

Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to, but be respected. Anna Gould

The UN was a veritable hive of activity this week, allowing those who logged in on the limited basis to conclude either that the world has either completely lost its mind or that it has found at least some of its ethical and policy bearings.  

Many of the “faithful remnant” who still consult these posts know a fair bit about the “lost mind” part.  The puzzling struggle in the Security Council over cross-border humanitarian access for Syrians; the seemingly endless US blockade of Cuba despite annual global condemnations; the crackdowns on journalists and civil society actors in settings from Turkey to Mynamar; the fresh casualties from our collective failure to stem the spread of new COVID-19 variants in part due to rhetorical support for vaccine access not matched by reliable deliveries; the armed groups, including forces made up entirely of children, taking lives with impunity in Burkina Faso and across the Sahel; the arms trafficking and lax measures on access and acquisition which are turned sections of the US and Latin America into weapons fortresses.

You get the point.  Even in a UN week dedicated in part to Counter-Terrorism it became clear that, despite some welcome progress on border control, weapons smuggling, human trafficking, and airline passenger data collection, terror groups often seem to be one step ahead of efforts to control their movements, restrict extremist rhetoric, and stem the recruitment of youth living in areas that offer little in the way of alternative hope.  That government actions too often feed terrorist narratives, as in the horrific example of Tigray where civilians are raped, tortured and starved and the lives of humanitarian workers are under constant siege, undermines at face value claims by some state and UN authorities that the pandemic – and not our own self-serving political interests and attendant rationalizations, is the underlying cause of our security-related breakdowns.

These are irregular times, but surely not primarily evil ones.   It is true that we have often hidden behind our bureaucracies and national interests, burying endless praise under protocol and seeking to call attention to what we are doing more than what is working, what comes next, what we need (besides money) that we don’t have, what role the rest of us should be playing to complement, and at times challenge, the decisions of states and diplomats.  It is also true that, disregarding regular calls for global and national cease fire arrangements, guns and various explosions continue to claim lives. Despite this, we continue to inadequately funnel our various human security activities, including on health, food and water access, into a more robust peace and security framework and then insist, here and now, that those tasked with such matters, especially the Security Council, do their jobs to maintain the peace or throw their collective weight behind agents and institutions that might have a better go of it.

Yes these are irregular times, but we are actually learning things, perhaps not enough and perhaps not in time, to stem the tide of violence and embrace the complex efforts of so many who are in the best sense of the term “essential workers.”  We have commented previously on the ways in which the UN honors the efforts and sacrifice of peacekeepers and other UN field staff, and has done so in ways beyond mere honoring, including mandates that narrow the gap between what is expected of peacekeepers and the training and capacity support required to do what is asked.  We also applaud that personnel able to engage communities and their most vulnerable members – including child and women protection advisers – are available to build trust and ensure context-specific protection in ways that soldiers with guns themselves cannot always do.  In this time, the honoring of peacekeepers and other field actors has evolved into something more than ceremonial, more than rhetorical, as their demands increase and threats to their safety proliferate.

And what of our front-line health workers, the “essential” professionals of this extended time of pandemic threat, those who found (and still find) themselves at the edge of exhaustion and despair trying to keep loved ones together and families and communities intact? Even more, what of those who perform these services not in modern hospitals but in makeshift clinics in urban and rural settings at times characterized by antiquated equipment, limited provisions for hungry families or vaccines for communities ravaged by the virus, and by the sounds of bombs which often distract from healing thoughts and sometimes even target their very facilities?  

In two events this week, one in the General Assembly and another in the Economic and Social Council, the UN sought to both honor these essential workers and to assess the state of affairs surrounding their grueling and often dangerous work.  We heard this week from many remarkable people, including a Ugandan woman helping to protect and empower persons with disabilities in the remote north of her country along with a bevy of other powerful policy and healing voices, some urging us in essence “to spare a thought” for those victimized by torture, pandemic, famine or sexual violence, but also for those who seek to rehabilitate them, to heal their wounds and restore some measure of the fulness of life after unimaginable ordeals.

But what made these events successful is that underlying the honoring of these workers – and we need to honor more often, more broadly, more sincerely – was the unambiguous recognition that “sparing a thought” was not nearly enough, not enough to change circumstances on the ground, not enough to restore hope in these “irregular times,” not enough to fulfill our responsibilities and ensure that we are better prepared for health and other threats to come; and thus our policy priorities must become as clear, distraction-free, respectful and sustainable as we can make them.

Where essential actions are concerned, there were in fact many urgent calls this week from UN officials and diplomats, calls for greater and more practical solidarity with front-line workers (from Costa Rica and the Caribbean community), for fresh and robust investments in health infrastructure (from the president of the General Assembly), for higher levels of mental health services for traumatized health and humanitarian workers and the victims they seek to serve (from the World Health Organization) and for a swift end to child marriage, child labor, child abuse, school attacks and other child-unfriendly practices which we should be ashamed to tolerate even one day longer (from the ICRC).

And for peace, blessed peace, that elusive commodity which, in its absence, makes every problem we face that much more difficult to solve, the armed violence which as noted this week by Acting USG Rajasingham complicates every aspect of health care and humanitarian access, ratcheting up dangers and demands for front-line workers in the field, and dampening hope and enthusiasm of traumatized community members who wonder amidst the noises of war if there will ever be a peaceful silence which grants them space to figure out other things, space to think great thoughts, make more culture, watch children play, and attend to other pressing needs within and beyond their own families.

Amidst the global carnage and policy partial-truths which punctuated this policy week, there were also some valuable lessons that rose to the surface, lessons grounded in dedicated efforts to heal our irregular hearts in part by narrowing the gaps between our rhetoric and our delivery.  We know that we must spend more time honoring and heeding the people who both care for us and hold up the promise of our world. We know that we must increase the solidarity needed to create more safe spaces for what can hopefully become a less harassed and stressed roster of front-line workers. We know that we must commit to build higher quality health infrastructure and take other measures to ensure that we are better focused and prepared to head off the next health crisis than we were for this one. We know we must increase access to vaccines, to potable water, to safe schools and to other measures which too many communities have been denied for far too long.

And we know that we must determine to make more peace in this world, peace in our communities, our schools and cultural institutions, our national and multi-lateral agencies.  It is a cliché to be sure, but it is hard to see how any of the problems we now face, any of the crises — current and looming — that now scar our planet and too many of its human inhabitants, can be resolved in sustainable fashion unless the guns have finally and fully gone silent.

Of all the rhetoric-delivery gaps which currently define our policy and practice, of all the misplaced promises that continue to stoke “unfavorable conditions” in our irregular world, the seemingly-endless cry for peace remains at the top of our attentions.  It is the cry, almost 18 years on in this current NGO arrangement, which we continue to hear the loudest and which we most encourage others of all ages and backgrounds to hear as well.

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Father Fear: A Fathers Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

20 Jun
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For generations fathers had watched earth and sea.  Pearl S. Buck

Was Father getting sadder, or was she just getting old enough to see it?  S.D. Smith

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you. Nicole Krauss

One of the biggest things that hold men back from being the fathers, husbands, and leaders they are meant to be is that we are often unfit, unhealthy, or otherwise limping along.   Josh Hatcher

He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.  Richard Ford

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.  Fyodor Dostoevsky

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.  George Orwell

“Are you a devil?” “I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.”  G. K. Chesterton

A couple of weeks ago, a favorite cousin of mine died from a sudden and gruesome bout with cancer.  His life was like many men I know, complex in its core, attempting to blend families and his responsibilities to them, attempting as well to overcome impediments – including to his own sight – that made many of the things he did more of an ordeal than they might have been, including the challenge of landscaping from which he made a living and to which he gave his most grateful soul.

My cousin was in great physical shape which likely prolonged the ordeal of his cancer but also made it possible for him to have the kinds of conversations with loved ones that help the dying to let go of life.  As his daughters occasionally reminded him, in ways subtle and not, he was not always the father of their dreams.  And like myself and many others, my cousin often “limped along,” in a world which disposes benefits and good fortune unevenly, trying to figure things out for himself and others, offering coaching guidance as he was able regarding how to persevere through adversity which is, after all, the lot of most of us in this world.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, the mask he wore was not particularly thick or meant to deceive.  He was more transparent than he might have needed to be, perhaps more so than his corner of the world was prepared to accept. He also evaded that all-too-frequent demon of ingratitude, the assumption that the world owed him more, owed him differently.  And he avoided that curse of our modern age, the error of exalting judgment at the expense of reflection, the knee-jerk reactions of too many of us to situations that just don’t seem right “to us,” reactions that grant us the arrogance of verdicts without trial, verdicts generally devoid of context. 

I raise up the image of my deceased cousin not because he was unique, but because he was not.  The responsibilities he assumed, the holes in his life that he tried to fill, the matrix of complex relationships he attempted to navigate, the impediments he sought to overcome – including some self-imposed – this constellation of challenges and, if you will, demons, are representative of many of the men in my life. It is perhaps a function of our longer-than-anticipated pandemic bubbles that so many of us now indulge in acting out, including of our ideological predispositions and prejudices.  But it is also true of how many men I know, including my cousin, who are genuinely trying in more controlled ways to figure things out, including figuring out how to support the fixing of racial, gender and social class discriminations that impede our social development and, in some core ways, threaten the very existence of our species.

These men have, at least to some extent, sought to understand their privilege and overcome the cultural conditioning which, in the US at least, simultaneously critiques and reinforces the narrative of men as predators, men as habitually self-absorbed, men as the reinforcers of a manifestly unjust social order that privileges the needs of the few over the needs of the many; men who take more than their share and give less than they claim; men who imagine themselves as some sort of “gold standard” even when others see mostly fools gold.  This is a deep if self-deceptive conditioning, one which is often reinforced across gender and economic lines, one which allows only a few to prosper as privilege leaks inexorably into entitlement.

And as our societies shift, slowly but inexorably like the tides of the sea, there is positive momentum to report, even to celebrate. At the UN we routinely discuss the gendered dimensions of food insecurity and counter-terror operations; we routinely discuss the importance of reproductive rights for the health, well-being and educational and social opportunities of girls; we spend much time and energy, albeit at times beset with numerous frustrations, attempting to end impunity for the commission of sexual violence crimes in and out of conflict zones. During my annual lectures for NATO School I also do my part to hold brass to the commitments made to the UN by NATO both to small arms proliferation and to their Women, Peace and Security responsibilities.  On both counts, there is less and less resistance to changes that they know they need to make, that it is in the best interests of everyone that they make. 

But there is no patting ourselves on the back here on gender (nor or on racial, cultural or religious discrimination) any more than the fathers (and mothers) I know seek to glorify themselves for upholding basic obligations of parenting.  We know full well that change has come too slowly.  And we know that we have not always put the authority and leverage at our disposal to use in making it come more quickly, in balancing the leger sheet and creating horizontal space within and beyond our perpetually vertical structures.  Moreover, we have not been grateful enough for our own circumstances nor sufficiently attentive to the cries for relief from others.

None of this is to our credit, and yet I wonder about the implications of the current narrative that, within the UN to be sure but also outside it, privileges judgment over thoughtfulness, judgment that rightly assumes a gendered dimension to the world’s many problems but which also implies that the value of men is solely a function of their ability to support and sustain others, that the intrinsic value of their activities is up for grabs, and that no matter what their journey or context, they remain directly accountable to the worst of their kind, the worst forms of patriarchal entitlement, the worst forms of violent recourse, the worst forms of inattentive and degrading parenting, the worst forms of predatory economic decisionmaking.

All of these conditions are real and all of them must cease.  However, in certain circles at least, much of this assigned only to the actions and priorities of men.  In addition, much of this is divorced from context, assuming that the demon-load residing in some can be attributed in the same measure to all, thereby justifying judgments that ascribe the worst to mostly all and the best to relatively none.  In too many of our policy settings, we don’t talk about men, we don’t ask probing questions of men, we don’t show much interest in their well-being or growth edges aside from how their lives might negatively impact others.  We tend to assume that we know all we need to know about men when what we actually know is clearly at low tide.

I don’t know entirely what to do about this condition, but on this Fathers Day when it seems safe enough and useful enough to speak of men, it also seems relevant to raise such concerns.  

Because I know so many men who are not lording it over others, who are not trafficking in hostility, who are not venting their patriarchal spleens on a no-longer unsuspecting world; who are instead trying to understand and then off-load their unearned privilege. I know many men who spend more time wondering if they did the right thing coaching their children and investing their own life energy than wondering how they can separate yet another community and its people from their worldly assets.  Whether others want to hear it or not, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, there are glimmers of sadness in the eyes of more than a few of the men I know, a sadness that things have simply not worked out the way they could have, the way they imagined they might – not for the self-sufficiency of their children or the strength of their marriages, not for the impact of their careers nor for prospects to reduce the misery load of a world which is arguably and generally in worse shape than it has been in some time, worse not primarily for men, but surely for many men also.

These are some of the people we have yet to engage in a larger social purpose, a purpose which can level and empower, can inspire and reassure.  This Father’s Day, or any day for that matter, I urge you to reach out to those men for whom sadness is possibly crowding out ambition, those anxious to stop limping and get back to full living, those who need reassurance that they are more than “ringing absences,” that they indeed count for something and can count for more in this broken, screwy, patriarchy-saturated planet given the right assurances and contexts.  For many of the men I have been honored to know, for many of the Fathers I have been honored to watch, most need something different to become their better selves, different than neckties and power equipment.  They need to be asked better questions; they need fair and thoughtful judgments; they need persons around them sensitive to context including the context they have helped men create for themselves and others. Such men may also need help, while they are still on this earth in “calculating their happiness,” in translating sadness and fear into gratitude and thereby finding the energy to create more harmony and justice in this world until their time has passed.

My cousin’s time has passed. He tried as best he knew to create beauty and honor his responsibilities. He would want others to try also.

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AIDS-mémoire: The Plague Last Time, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 Jun

Twas doing nothing was his curse. Is there a vice can plague us worse?” Hannah More

Each day the pair would meet at 2pm at the exact halfway point between the villages and stand a hundred yards apart, staring longingly at each other, yearning for the time when the pestilence would pass.  Tom Cox

Plague germs are notorious for their non-observance of class distinctions. Palagummi Sainath

Before coronapocalypse, people were so distracted by items presenting themselves throughout life; items that really do not matter. Noise for the mind. Ways to distract the heart. Now there are no more distractions, noise evaporated. Everyone must face their truth now: their Demons and their Angels.  C. JoyBell C.

I recalled how cruel the plague had made people to each other, and was obliged to concede that there is no disaster which can befall humanity, that we will not fail to make worse by our own hands, for it is fear that makes us cruel.  Sarah Burton

Thus, whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in our hearts. Albert Camus

The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. Emma Donoghue

It is not news to anyone who even occasionally consults these posts that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted personal and institutional life in ways that were only partially predictable.  At the UN for instance, we are keenly aware of how the pandemic has impacted some of our core, collective commitments, complicating the missions of peacekeepers and humanitarian workers, creating new dangers and levels of urgency for health care workers, exposing inequalities in health care and food access that have only become more difficult to overcome, even intensifying security deficits as movement-related restrictions caused by the pandemic have created fresh opportunities for armed groups and terrorists to expand their physical influence and step up online recruitment. 

Even during a week when an international court rejected an appeal of the convicted Ratko Mladic, the so-called “butcher of Bosnia,” the talk in the Security Council was in large measure about the cases remaining to be tried, the indictments remaining to be honored, and the general difficulty of carrying out the vital work of justice (or conducting investigations of any global importance) in the midst of our current plague.

At a another level, we have a growing sense of the diverse impacts of this pandemic on personal and family life:  the isolation and depression as we struggle to maintain some semblance of sanity and overcome personal distances; the discriminatory acting out of fear and even cruelty on each other; the despair in many places of having to care for loved ones as services further erode and vaccines remain out of reach; the “habitual conflict of cupidities” that has served to inflame a sense of injustice but also dampened the belief that human beings are actually capable of delivering it. For many, thanks in part to COVID-19 and our reactions to its limitations, both our sense of self and our hope for humanity have taken a serious hit.

In this week of genuinely impactful UN events, including a global dialogue on food systems, the selection of a new president for the General Assembly (Maldives) and a farewell message from the extraordinary prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, reflecting on her long pursuit of justice and accountability for the people of Darfur, it was particularly meaningful for me that the General Assembly devoted much of its week to a discussion on HIV/AIDS, a plague from the past for many in the “developed” world, but one which continues to infect people in many global regions, especially those youth whose limited access to antiretroviral therapies and related health care continues to sicken them in ways that we don’t often encounter any longer here in New York. 

The GA event was a stark reminder of the promises the UN community once made together to eliminate the scourge of HIV/AIDS, to end what is for some in the last stages of HIV infection a horrific death from predatory infections to which their bodies become increasingly vulnerable, a death not dissimilar in its grimness to those many millions –old and young, poorer and richer, people who were loved and cherished –who have literally drowned in their own fluids as their own bodies turned against them due to COVID-19.

HIV moves along a somewhat similar path but with some clear differences, most of which were duly noted by the diplomats and other speakers, including Charlize Theron whose presence graced the hall and who advocated passionately for the creation of “enabling environments,” especially for young people, that can both provide help and communicate hope. In addition to her, I was impressed with the statement of Ghana’s health minister who advocated for an “evidence-based and people-centered” approach to HIV/AIDS caregiving as well as the Minister of France who noted that the point here is “not to replace one health care threat with another” but to build strong and reliable health infrastructure and rebut those who deny the virtues of science-based diagnostics and care. Many delegations, including Ecuador and Netherlands, stressed the importance of “harm reduction” measures for young people, including in the form of reproductive services for female youth, to increase the odds that they can avoid HIV infection altogether and receive prompt care — even from health services ravaged by COVID-19 — when prevention fails.

Perhaps the most impressive voice during this high-level event was that of UNAIDS director Winnie Byanyima, who set an urgent and hopeful tone relevant both to the current pandemic and the one to which we still have unmet responsibilities. She underscored the “bold shifts” we still can and must take, including dramatically improving access to the best medical services and countering the discrimination and stigma that continues to accompany HIV infection in several global regions. She also reminded us that, in its application, “science moves at the speed of political will” while insisting that, as much as we seem to deny it, “we are more than inter-connected; we are inseparable.”

In many ways, this meeting represented the best of the UN: reminding us of unfinished business and tying the promises of the past to the urgencies of the present. And reminding us of our personal responsibilities to ensure services and end stigmas, to resist the temptation to “settle” with our pandemics and then seek to sit out their threats and consequences on the sidelines.

To my mind, it is the depth of stigma which separates HIV from the current COVID plague.  I recall our efforts in the 80s and 90s through East Harlem Interfaith and nearby Saint Cecilia’s Catholic Church, efforts to create safe space for persons living and dying with HIV/AIDS (often young and not even near their prime), a space to mourn and grieve, a space to find accompaniment as infection turned into full-on plague: the loss of weight, the ubiquitous sores, the difficulty breathing, the extreme fatigue, the endless fevers.  And on top of all this were the often-profound emotional impacts: the shifts in mood and cognitive capacity, the depression that came from experiencing a body that was literally turning on itself, a body which seemed determined to cast aside all common and once-dependable functions.

We did our best to mitigate some of the impacts of lives set to end without the comfort of familiar faces, faces which in too many instances had already rejected them, had already abandoned them to live out the final chapter of this “gay plague” in utter isolation from all they once knew.   For many, it was the stigma they faced, often at the hands of those who had once pledged to love and protect them, which was the saddest aspect of a multiply painful journey.  There was little for us to say; at times there was little to be done.  This plague was set to take the dozens of men who had accepted what care we were able to provide, to cover their wounds and listen to their tales of abandonment-related grief, to hear their confessions and offer what little comfort we were able. And to ensure that the end of these lives were duly recognized by the community which had committed to gather around them, members of a community who in too many cases were soon to replicate that mortal path. 

Even in this time of COVID-19, even in this time where we are quicker to judge than to think; even now when, in the US at least, mask wearing has been a symbol of some alleged malevolent government intent that is causing record high gun sales with corresponding discharges of weapons (or fists) often directed at unsuspecting objects of hate; even amidst all of this there is compassion in considerable measure to be found, compassion for those lives have holes in them due to pandemic distancing; compassion for those medical workers and other humanitarians who have risked their own lives to save us from ourselves: compassion which we must find a way to cultivate in even greater measure if we are to put current pandemics to rest and survive pandemics to come. Simply put, we must find the means to reinforce the best of our humanity as plagues here now and around the bend threaten to bring out some of the worst.

The message of this week’s GA event was clear.  HIV/AIDS is not over.  COVID-19 is certainly not over.  And there may be new challenges of this sort to come for us, new “stalemates” to achieve with regard to a new round of deadly viruses. But what is most likely to do us in, what threatens us most deeply, is ourselves, our predispositions to stigma and discrimination, our endless talent for making enemies out of neighbors; our willingness to use crisis as an excuse for selfishness, indifference and even violence.  We have not seen the last of HIV/AIDS; neither have we seen the last of the plagues which are sure to visit our fractured human world, the fear of which will unleash new waves of cruelty and indifference unless we have prepared ourselves to choose a different, kinder, less discriminatory path.

Such preparation must begin together and begin in earnest.

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Trust Funds: The UN Steps Towards a Culture of Integrity, Dr. Robert Zuber

6 Jun

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.  Mahatma Gandhi

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. Ayn Rand

It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.  Frank Herbert

Procrastination is also a subtle act of corruption – it corrupts valuable time. Amit Abraham

The aim of the old should be to ensure that the young grow up incorruptible.  Justin K. McFarlane Beau

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.  Clive James

He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider.  Ernest Hemingway

I spent an hour last evening on a call organized by LINGAP Canada and featuring an indigenous activist from the Philippines seeking to protect the lands of local people from the onslaughts of both an international mining interest and governments at local and federal levels who enabled this corporate incursion. As is far too common, they offered police protection against the activists pushing back against operations which, in too many instances, have cover in the form of government contracts which are not transparent, which do not incorporate local needs and interests, and which confer large swaths of immunity as mining interests appropriate local water supplies, denude forests and destroy the social cohesion of communities and the biodiversity which once enveloped them.

In the rush to secure the precious metals and other resources that fuel lifestyles in the developed world, corporations are willing to drive hard bargains with government officials as they seek contracts that ensure maximum flexibility and only limited responsibility for the damage done to land and water.  For the governments, mining interests promote both “economic development” and, in the absence of genuine transparency, a reliable source of self-enrichment.   For the activists seeking to hold mining interests to a standard beyond their technically “legal” obligation, they often face both personal danger and the sad realization that the lands they love have likely been disfigured beyond the ability of any human or natural force to restore.  When the mining interests have extracted all there is to extract, the land they leave behind might be little more than a biological shell of its former self, a land now ill-suited to sustain the life it had previously supported for millennia. 

This story frames what was a busy week of intersected UN conversations focused on the multiple, negative impacts of corruption together with our still-uphill struggle to reverse climate change, avert a new round of biodiversity loss, preserve what remains of the health of our oceans, and heal our often-battered local ecosystems. 

The key here is “together.”  What was apparent during a fine UN Special Session (including side events) focused on “measures to prevent and combat corruption” is that corruption is both pervasive and “magnetic,” attracting unscrupulous and self-interested individuals like bees to honey, providing both opportunities and rationalizations for those among us more interested in exploiting fragility than helping it to heal.  What the president of the Economic and Social Council, Ambassador Akram of Pakistan, referred to this week as the “criminal misuse of resources” is an indictment that implicates many of us in our current world, a world in which integrity and transparency are constantly butting heads with that part of our nature which, as Sri Lanka’s Ambassador maintained, remains “purchasable.” 

As several speakers noted this week, including during an excellent side event organized by the president of the General Assembly, our current contexts make combating corruption a particularly formidable challenge.  The global pandemic coupled with the gross inequalities tied to our obsession with “wealth and power” are magnifying opportunities to divert resources from intended to unintended purposes, to maneuver contracts towards personal friends and business partners rather than to those providing the best and most cost-effective services, to deliberately direct vaccines and funds for pandemic response towards political supporters and away from political adversaries, to sign contracts that are full of loopholes enabling abuses and even kickbacks that ultimately rob citizens of development funds, undermine rights and even dampen enthusiasm for change.

But as the week’s events made clear, it is not only about the expanding opportunities for corrupt practices but the range of such practices – and their toxic consequences — that warrants prompt international attention.  Our former notions of corruption – of money in a brown envelope sliding under a table and designed to influence decisions — is still relevant but overly narrow.  We understand more now about the “trade-offs” that we are much too comfortable making, trade-offs that impede our path towards what the Holy See referred to this week as a “culture of integrity.”  We are too quick to rationalize behavior that we should readily challenge instead, thereby “consorting” with the structures of power that we know are often not operating in the public interest.  We know that, as Chile’s Ambassador stated, funds and lives are lost when we allow corrupt practices to flourish, when we accede to cultures of corruption that are within our grasp to shift.  We continue to allow people to “walk through our minds with their dirty feet,” making compromise with what Mexico declared to be a social “evil” more and more palatable, at least for some, just part of the cost of doing business as an “insider” in a sometimes unsavory world. 

And as one speaker after another this week noted, the consequences of corruption are dire, not only for the activists on the ground who must dodge unsubstantiated accusations and at times even bullets, but for the average citizen who still needs to believe that the large governmental and corporate powers that seem to run our lives have at least some of our best interests at heart; indeed that they are able and willing to play by the same rules that they expect the rest of us to play by.  The word that popped up over and over in this UN context is “trust,” a term which is hard to quantify and which diplomats are often fond of claiming for their governments without sufficient evidence; but a word which also continues to resonate deeply for many of us. 

Naively or otherwise, some of us still need to believe that, within the limits of human capacity and habit, that our public structures are trustworthy or can be made so; that mistakes are due to factors other than wanton malevolence; that the people who run the world operate on energies more diverse than riches and power; that leaders are willing and able to set a better example for those who might otherwise be inclined to join the parade of those convinced that the only way to “get ahead” is at the expense of others. And yet as the director of the UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime noted with considerable alarm, too many of us have become “cynical” regarding both our responsibility and capacity to end corruption, to address an enemy “that shows little signs of retreating.”  Despite the contention of Latvia’s minister that his public at least seems be losing its “tolerance for corruption,” it still seems as though state and corporate entities are largely talking a better game than they play, thus setting a tone allowing too many of the rest of us to do likewise.

One of the things we might conveniently ignore in this context is the degree to which trust once betrayed is difficult to regain, in some instances more difficult than restoring a once-denuded Philippines mountainside. And this trust-busting incarnates a multitude of implications beyond government procurement and election results.  For instance, how do we as citizens and local communities get on board with healthy oceans, with greenhouse gas reductions, with rehabilitating eco-systems supporting healthier biodiversity if we can’t trust large state and corporate entities to do their part, to honor their promises, to use the resources at hand for public good rather than private interest?  How do we inspire sacrifices in communities when those who command the most money and power are reluctant to sacrifice anything of themselves, or even agree to play fair?

And what of the youth who, as one young contributor this week noted, must anxiously watch as their own futures are jeopardized by the corruption which drains public coffers of the funds that could be used – should be used – to clean up our environmental messes and put our economies on a more solid, greener footing.  Traditional means of fighting corruption, she maintained, are not sufficient to address levels of self-interested illegality which take up too much space in our current political and economic environment, indeed which are putting more and more young people in the unenviable position of needing to “sell their own integrity” to keep any glimmer of personal progress on track.

This week, Kenya’s president urged the UN community to “raise the bar” on integrity, recommending that states support more education for youth on “ethical values” in this effort.  But we must be sure, as the PGA noted, not to “kick this can down the road.”  Young people have much to contribute, especially at local level, to building trust and capacity for a more sustainable world.  But the rest of us need to set a better example, a more honest and transparent example, an example which communicates our resolve to identify and end all manifestations of corruption from our own lives, even to end the procrastination that rationalizes our putting off until tomorrow what we promised to address today.

The open and lifeless pits our mining interests leave behind are only one of the residual craters complements of our many self-interested and self-deceptive personalities. We have only a matter of years to demonstrate that we can rise to a higher standard, that we can return what has been stolen and then commit not to steal again, that we can repair some of what we’ve damaged and then commit not to damage further.  In this way, we might be able to convince other, younger persons that a fairer and more sustainable world is still within our grasp, and that the buying and selling of this world need not include the buying and selling of our souls.

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Mentoring Protection: A Caregivers’ Role, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 May

“Survivor” by Bisa Butler

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. Gwendolyn Brooks

It is today that our best work can be done.  W. E. B. Du Bois

Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.  Mae West

Don’t let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter.  Michael Bassey Johnson

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. Colson Whitehead

Life is so complete that even when we are knocked on our backs, we have the best view of the stars. Laura Teresa Marquez

Yeah, exactly where a dad should be. Holding a firearm and warding off potential suitors until that daughter is of consenting age, he said. “Which in my book is about forty-six.  Mary H.K. Choi

This was “protection of civilians week” at the UN, an annual event when we examine our commitments to protect the vulnerable and threatened, but also to honor those whose skills and instincts for protecting others put their lives at risk and much-too-often end them entirely. 

We at the UN normally associate our protection commitments with peacekeeping operations, the soldiers, police and civilian components, most often seconded from UN member states, who are tasked with protecting civilians in some of the most demanding conflict environments on earth.  Through ever-more sophisticated intelligence gathering, logistical support, threat assessment and (in the best of circumstance) adequate ground and air assets, peacekeepers are increasingly able to stay a step ahead of armed groups and other “spoilers” while providing gender and culturally-sensitive assistance to communities and host states through what seems to be an ever-widening range of mandated duties from election monitoring and vaccination assistance to “quick impact projects” designed to build both trust and capacity in host communities.

In a series of UN discussions over this past week, including in the Security Council, the UN and its partners both honored sacrifices made and assessed the current state of play in what is an increasingly complex tapestry of both protection responsibilities and threats to protectors.  Among the former are efforts to address deficits related to food insecurity and health-related access as climate change and armed conflict disrupt agricultural cycles and vaccine “hoarding” leaves many millions vulnerable to a deadly virus and its seemingly unrelenting variants.  Among the latter are threats from formally-designated terrorists and other armed groups increasingly able to incite violence through digital means with seemingly unfettered access to trafficked weapons and the capacity to construct and deploy improvised explosive devices which constitute perhaps the greatest, current, operational threat to peacekeeper safety.

To my mind, amidst the many helpful protection-related discussions at the UN this week, two in particular stood out.  The first of these was an event entitled “Local Perspectives on the Protection of Civilians: The Impact of Conflict and Hunger,” which shifted vantage points on protection towards the most fundamental of needs – for nutrition, for access to water, for livelihoods that can sustain families and communities.  A South Sudanese advocate spoke of the “dream” of many women in her country for “livelihood options” in a country still wrestling with corruption and insurgency, weapons trafficking (despite an arms embargo) and diverse impediments to agricultural sufficiency.  The Afghanistan director of the UN’s World Food Programme put the local protection crisis in sharper (and somewhat shocking) relief, citing vast, conflict-induced nutritional deficits that raise the prospect, based on her long experience in conflict zones, of generations literally “being wiped out.” One speaker after another reinforced what has now and sadly become commonplace, the degree to which the impacts of conflict in this time of asymmetrical threats, now complicated by a pandemic, bear protection implications far beyond conventional fields and/or modalities of struggle.

Another important protection event of the week was hosted by Ireland and devoted to “Improving the Protection of Civilians in UN Peacekeeping Transitions,” a discussion on how UN contingents can best honor responsibilities assumed and relationships forged once the decision has been made by the Security Council to draw down peacekeeping operations and transition responsibilities to other UN capacities and, especially, to national contingents.  Ireland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Coveny made several helpful contributions to the broader discussion on protection, noting that peacekeeping transitions must be sensitive both to the situation on the ground and to the relationships which have been forged at local level, people who may now find themselves dependent for some aspects of protection on government forces who may have the capacity to protect but may also lack the will to do so.  The MFA noted that the “path to peace,” the path that could one day make peacekeeping obsolete, requires more of us in the interim, including greater sensitivity to the anxiety from security risks that withdrawal might engender.  At the very least, he noted, we must ensure that the pace of such withdrawals is determined by specific community concerns and security-related circumstances and not driven merely by “budgetary considerations.”

While protection mandates for peacekeepers continue to expand there is also the need to expand our assessment of what protection requires; certainly to those tasked with providing it but also to those living in that zone that most of us find ourselves in over the course of our lives – needing protection in some aspects but also offering it ourselves, offering it to children of course but also to neighbors, the elderly, those who have been through harrowing circumstances, those experiencing limited capacity to fend off threats to themselves in the short or long term.  

In this regard, an image was offered at the top of this post courtesy of Bisa Butler’s remarkable exhibit now at Chicago’s Art Institute. Among her stunningly colorful, woven portraits of African-American culture is this one depicting a woman in considerable distress being held up by two other women, neither of whom appear to be “protectors” in the professional sense, but both of whom were clearly in accompaniment to the suffering of the third, bearing at least some of her burdens and providing reassurance that the suffering she now experienced would not have to be experienced alone.

For many of us, this is the lens on protection that is most familiar, bearing the wounds of others in real time, caring for those close at hand, making hard decisions about when and how to assume risks, acting on our best assessments of the experiences that harm and those that traumatize, how to respond best to short and longer-term dangers to personal and and community well-being.

In a world awash in weapons often in the hands of unscrupulous actors, it is understandable to put protection from weapons in the hands of those also bearing weapons, those able to respond to threats of armed violence with coercive measures in kind. But this is not at all the end of the matter. For instance, Indonesia made a particularly good point this week in calling for “mentoring” of national contingents by peacekeeping forces, thereby helping to ensure that such contingents manifest both the capacity and the will to protect, and that such protection is undertaken with full regard for the dignity and rights of the protected. 

But there is another piece to this mentoring, the piece communicated by Butler’s woven portrait, the piece embodied by those with their fingers on the pulse of what protection is needed and what is merely intrusive, the protection that requires a blend of both outside assistance and community resolve, including the will to accompany and the creation of enabling environments to endure, to heal and to reintegrate.  The mentoring of these equally-essential skills and capacities, as some of the voices from diverse conflict zones made plain this week, must also be a part of our modalities of protection, must also and increasingly be part of how we help our professional protectors help the rest of us to be “each other’s magnitude and bond” when troubles loom.

In this time of multiple stressors, we find more and more people pulling inward, creating moats of sorts around their most intimate places, protecting with a vengeance from threats that seem largely assumed and at times even invented.   We must resist the tendency to allow the rain to drive us to the wrong shelter, a shelter that is either heavily weaponized or cut off from the world we should be prepared to re-enter once the rain passes. The “business” of protection is for all of us, not only in assessing threats but in holding each other up in times of crisis, in times of need, of being each other’s harvest, of ensuring that loss and pain will not be the final word.

As many who serve in peacekeeping operations know well, weapons and other coercive measures are only part of the solution to protection threats. The rest is a common responsibility grounded in our capacity to formulate and uphold, to assess and accompany, to assist those knocked on their backs to recognize that there are stars above, that there is, indeed, hope for peace and health, for sustenance and livelihood once the current misery has been dispelled.

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COP Out: Rebalancing a Fractured Harmony, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 May
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The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.  Joseph Campbell

Food and the human spirit have become estranged.  Masanobu Fukuoka

You must answer the call and pick your way. And there is no reverse.  J.R. Ward

We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.  Alan Watts

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.  Vincent Van Gogh

If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.  Henri Poincaré

It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within. Rachel Carson

As most of you know, a week of violence in the Middle East ended with yet another cease fire, an agreement that stopped (for now) the aerial assaults from Israeli bombers and Hamas missiles but which had little immediate impact on the bitter fruits of occupation, the settlements and demolitions, the ethnic cleansing which proceeded apace in areas of Jerusalem on which, apparently at least, the cease fire agreement was presumed to have no palliative impact.

And then there is the wreckage across Gaza, a postage-sized land already suffering from human deprivation and environmental degradation which now lies once again in ruins, a testament to the diverse and damaging consequences of armed conflict that a cease fire exposes but hardly cures. In Palestine as in so much of the rest of the world, there is a misleading quiet now, one bearing little prospect of harmony with our adversaries or with the planet we share.

I know that this lack of harmony, this willingness to cast aside cynicism and “humbug” and live more “musically,” is not unique to this moment. Certainly since the beginning of the industrial age, and likely much longer, we have demonstrated an almost genetic predisposition to unharmonious relations with our world and with each other, exploiting resources for personal gain, defending even when defense wasn’t necessary, justifying aggression in the name of religion or nation, taking more than we need and sharing less than we should.

But this time feels different. The warning sirens blare more loudly now, especially on climate change and species extinction. The bombs we use to punish adversaries are are both more explosive and more technologically clever now. The policy promises we make to each other are increasingly subject to caveats and political expediency. The institutions we have established to protect us from ourselves are proving incapable in many aspects of adjusting to evolving threats, including from extremist groups, climate risks and community-killing drought.

Our world seems often like a band that is not only out of tune but where the musicians seem committed more to compete for attention than to share in the “glory and magnificence” that our music can generate, that our world can generate as well if only we would commit to being its reliable and sensitive agents. Indeed, there is a concern in many quarters that the shrill notes emanating from our competitive and self-serving actions are drowning out the sirens that continue to blare their unsettling omens, blasting messages of urgent appeal to those who are still able to listen and heed the warnings, messages indicating that our time is limited to bring more harmony to our fractured world, to finally and sustainably make our own heartbeats “match the beat of the universe.”

Needless to say, this is no easy task. Many who used the opportunity of pandemic lockdown to establish a better work-life balance or shift their personal priorities know a bit of how difficult it can be to reset ourselves, to practice and then maintain vigilance regarding those things about each of us that threaten “destruction from within.” And once we move from our domiciles to the wider society, harmony becomes a far greater challenge. Indeed much of our personal “resetting” has as one of its objectives increasing our ability to manage the demands and stresses of a human world often spinning out of control, often failing to fulfill even the most fundamental of its values and commitments.

And yet the desire and demand for this greater, global harmony has not entirely disappeared, does not entirely verge on the edge of the extinction that now threatens so many of our fellow-species. Even in the hyper-political environment of the United Nations, a place where we routinely confuse resolution with commitment, consensus with harmony, there are growing community concern about the consequences of human “estrangement,” from our food to be sure, but also from the complexities of the natural world and even, perhaps especially, from each other.

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the president of the Economic and Social Council, Pakistan’s Ambassador Akram, seem determined to convince the UN community of the “war on nature” that we insist on conducting, a “war” we are ultimately waging on ourselves, a “war” that too-easily spills over into active armed conflict and enables future pandemics, a “war” we are simply incapable of winning. And yet, amidst the week’s policy oxygen consumed by the violence in the Middle East, UN events also took place that reminded us of the ticking clock signifying our current, potentially-irreversible course as various human practices damage biodiversity across the spectrum, not only the large species we tend to identify with but a large food chain of both enormous complexity and increasing susceptibility to the onslaughts of our current, unsustainable levels of production and consumption.

One of those was the annual event sponsored by the Mission of Slovenia to honor “World Bee Day,” a session that could easily seem trivial alongside a week of coups and famines, missile launches and crimes against humanity. But as my friends who keep bees and raise plants that attract their numbers recognize, bees and other pollinators are both endangered and crucial to life on earth. Indeed as this event noted, perhaps 80% of what nourishment humans consume requires essential input from bees. Moreover, the concept note crafted by Slovenia links endangered bees to a range of other biodiversity and ecosystem threats, noting that “current negative trends are projected to undermine progress towards a high number of the assessed targets of the Sustainable Development Goals related to poverty, hunger, health, sustainable consumption and production, water, cities, climate, oceans and land.” As we continue to pave over wetlands, degrade farmland, plant non-native species and denude forests, the damage we inflict on the smallest of our life forms exacerbates conditions which directly threaten the largest and most clever among us.

The other event of note on this theme was a preparatory meeting, hosted by the Mission of China, to encourage enthusiasm for the “COP15” meeting on biodiversity protection to be held next October in Kunming. China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs along with senior UN officials lent an air of gravitas to this session which was thankfully less about advertising and branding and more about our urgent biodiversity decline and the immediate need, as expressed at this session by the president of the General Assembly, to both enhance local ownership of biodiversity protection and factor in the importance and value (writ large) of nature into all our policymaking.  Too often, he noted, a tree is only ascribed value in this world once it has been felled.

And many trees continue to be felled in all global regions. In a discouraging report released this week by Forest Trends, it appears that trees have incredibly been brought down faster in the years since companies and governments promised to stop cutting them down. And another report recently released by a consortium of European researchers put the spotlight on one of the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss, namely our willfully and habitually “unsound” management of chemicals and waste, once again despite formal promises to the contrary.

It is reports such as these than temper the enthusiasm of myself and others for these large COP events, which tend to create environmental footprints far deeper than their policy impacts and promise far more than they ultimately deliver. Yes, we need immediate, tangible progress on biodiversity as we do on climate change and ocean health. But are the upcoming COP events any more likely than previous ones to shift policy dynamics in discernable ways? Are they at all likely, to paraphrase the GA president, to enable more robust action at local level, to help local activists, in the recent words of one, build bridges wide enough for everyone to cross over our current abyss and reach another side characterized more by harmony than chaos? Are they likely to sustain the buzzing of bees and other insects that still manage to overcome our collective assaults and fill our markets with produce? Are they sufficient to reset our notions of value such that we understand more than we apparently do now that a beautiful, harmonious and balanced world is ultimately essential to current and future lives worth living?

With full regard for activists struggling to maintain their voices and their sanity in this “kill the messenger” time, we in our sector must do more, will do more, to insist that these COP events serve interests beyond the branding of host states, that their ecological expense is calculated in more than mere dollars and cents, that their deliberations are as urgent as the problems which have merely multiplied on our watch, that their outcomes don’t simply add to the long list of promises misplaced or incompletely kept. We need more than political declarations from our leadership, more than grand sessions leading to perfunctory outcomes. If indeed, as Ambassador Akram noted on Friday, this war on nature is actually a war on ourselves, then we have no excuses for postponing a truce, ending our deep estrangement from nature, and reversing the biodiversity loss we are running out of time to address.

This band of ours needs to be brought back in tune without delay. Our farewell tour as a species may be closer than we think.

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Smoldering Embers: The Fire of Violence we Fail to Extinguish, Dr. Robert Zuber

16 May
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Every day the community faces the possibility of breakdown — not from the forces of nature but from sheer human unpredictability.  Robert Heilbroner

The fundamental idea is not that of removing disturbing elements and letting things settle down, but that of introducing a peace-power among the disputants.  Vilhelm Grønbech

Endless numbers of speeches, publications, political debates do not have the function of getting at the root of important questions of life but of drowning them in verbiage.  Wilhelm Reich

A late justice is a lame justice.  Amit Kalantri

We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.  Sarah Olson

There are innumerable ways to murder a person, but the most subtle and pernicious of these is to mutilate the soul of the innocent by denying or downgrading their uniqueness and their beauty.  Gerry Spence

Is not most talking a crazed defense of a crumbling fort?  Hafiz

Like others of my ilk, I am poised in front of a computer screen early on a Sunday morning waiting for the start of the Security Council emergency session following another long week of deadly violence in a conflict between Israel and Palestine that is as old as the UN itself.

The images from this recent, relentless exchange of hostilities have been heaped on top of so many others over many years, the fires we have addressed when they rage but which we never bother to completely extinguish, the embers of incitement and occupation, of intimidation and brutality that are one brisk wind away from igniting yet again, forcing the Council and other UN member states to public affirm their client interests or shrink into the background hoping that the red glow beneath the ashes from the last rounds of hatred and violence will somehow spare us all from what has almost become inevitable — more misery for the people, more trauma for the children, more narrow, nationalist justifications for occupation, more incitement to violence, more talking unattached to remedial response.

Amidst the disturbing images of buildings reduced to rubble with little warning for the civilians and media professionals who occupied them, the “iron dome” patterns in the night sky in response to missile attacks emanating from Gaza, the brutal measures adopted by Israeli defense forces on worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque at the end of Ramadan, the ecstatic jumping for joy of a group of Israelis as that same mosque was seen engulfed in flames, the young boy rushing to the head of a funeral line to say a final goodbye to his muirdered father. There is no shortage of heartbreak in these images of conflict allowed to rage, allowed to recur over and over. There never is.

Perhaps the most heart-tugging image of all was courtesy of a video widely circulated of a young girl surveying the wreckage from one of many air attacks on Gaza this week. As she held back tears, she remarked while pointing at the rubble “You see this? What am I supposed to do? Fix it? I’m only 10.”

She’s only 10, living in what some have called an “open air prison,” wanting to “help my people” but for now having to live with rubble both physical and psychological as she awaits her turn to serve and to lead, a turn which unless we cease this recurring cycle of misery might never come.

Sadly, as we know, hers is not the only story of childhood-denying misery, misery that will likely require herculean efforts to heal, misery which will turn a few children into heroic adults while leaving many others angry and despondent over years of having their beauty and potential denigrated, leaving scars that won’t easily disappear. Such scars represent a future in grave jeopardy for us all, a future for which we all bear some responsibility but certainly for the nations and institutions which continue to cover up abuses and other crimes, which continue to advocate for client states, simultaneously selling them weapons and undermining any timely prospect of accountability.

The UN earlier in the week gave good attention to another tragedy not as long on its watch, the genocidal violence committed beginning in 2014 by ISIL terrorists against the Yazidi people of northern Iraq, including mass executions of men and young women forced into conditions of sexual slavery.

There are differences between the situation facing the Yazidi and that now faces Gaza. While it may turn out to be the case that some UN member states have enabled ISIL violence through some nefarious back-channel means, ISIL itself has no visible state protectors. The violence which was inflicted against the Yazidi has been widely encouraged by the international community to be thoroughly investigated by UNITAD though this has so far not resulted in tangible prosecutions seven years after the occurrence of these abuses. Such investigations have only recently enabled the conditions for Nadia Murad and many other Yazidi to properly bury their murdered loved ones amidst a cloud of revisited sorrow, one piece of a relatively uncomplicated (if deferred) promise of some genuine closure, some eventual justice for perpetrators, some final resting place for the unimaginable pain inflicted over many months. Gaza currently experiences few such tangible promises.

And yet, there are several lessons from Iraq that could be applied to the violence in and around Gaza which as of this writing shows little prospect of abating: the importance of thorough investigation of abuses and competent justice mechanisms; the need for transparency regarding the political alliances and backroom deals that undermine the peace and justice we claim to want; the firm resolve to cease all arms sales and transfers into conflict zones; the importance of investigating and then sharing not only the specific consequences of armed violence but exposing the reticence of those tasked with ending violence to uphold their full responsibility to ensure that violence once constrained is not allowed to recur. In addition there is the lesson, largely unheeded, to put an end to a Council practice which enables the major powers to shield clients (Israel, Syria, Myanmar and more) from the legal consequences of the most horrific of their actions.

As the emergency Security Council meeting on the Israel-Gaza violence earlier this morning draws to a close, it is not at all apparent that we have learned the lessons which are now required of us. Despite some passionate and eloquent statements by Palestine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and his counterparts from Ireland, Jordan and Norway, it is unclear that the US will loosen the most toxic connections to its support for Israel; it is unclear that the “back channel” efforts to resolve the violence claimed by some states will ever see the light of public scrutiny; it is unclear that arms trade restraint will soon become the norm rather than the exception; it is unclear that states are uniformly willing to help the International Criminal Court and other legal entities apply the lens of justice now becoming operational in Iraq to bring closure to so many Gaza children and others in the region terrorized and victimized over so many years by a range of violent acts; it is unclear if states understand beyond their own rhetoric that putting out the Gaza fire is not the same thing as suppressing the immediate flames, but requires more attention, more hands-on action, more responsibility to address all aspects of our current cycles of violence.

And part of this responsibility requires a commitment to discernment that is often hard to come by in diplomatic settings, discernment regarding our failure, metaphorically speaking, to ensure that the “campfire” of violence is completely snuffed out, that those embers of future destruction which continue to smolder long after we have damped down the most damaging and obvious flames are no longer allowed to flare up again and engulf entities and citizens with what in our current circumstance seems like an otherwise inevitable renewal of their searing heat.

We have the capacity to turn current political impediments into peace power, a “power” that demands of us a determination to ensure that the fire of mass conflict has been fully and utterly extinguished. So long as the embers of our once-raging violence continue to glow, so long as they continue to threaten, we in the peace and security community simply cannot claim to have done our proper jobs.

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