Service Contract:  Sharing the Burdens of a World At Odds, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Jun

Service

You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. Martin Luther King Jr.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.  Rabindranath Tagore

One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone. Shannon Alder

I’m starting to think this world is just a place for us to learn that we need each other more than we want to admit. Richelle Goodrich

The UN had its moments of schizophrenia this week:  An historic decision to approve by consensus the Secretary-General’s proposal for reform of the UN Development System occurred on the same day that the chairs of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies held a rare and important discussion on the crucial role of these treaties in fulfilling our sustainable development goals, a discusson that few bothered to attend.   The Security Council, due in part to a US veto, fumbled away an effort by Kuwait to ensure a measure of international protection for Palestinians enduring deprivation and violence –especially in the Gaza strip– on the same day that the UN highly honored peacekeepers who sacrificed their lives attempting to stabilize and offer protection in what have become increasingly volatile and unpredictable conflict zones.

This particular honoring of fallen peacekeepers through the Hammarskjöld Medal Award Ceremony had special significance, both because of this being the 70th anniversary of UN peacekeeping and because the list of casualties to which we all properly call attention seems to be growing longer each and every year.  From Tanzania and Pakistan to Ethiopia and Morocco, troops volunteer to be placed in harm’s way to stabilize and protect only to find themselves on the receiving end of a bullet or explosive device.  As is well known, Mali (MINUSMA) has been a place of particular vulnerability for peacekeepers.  As explained by USG Lacroix during the honoring ceremony, MINUSMA forces directly experience one violent incident on the average of every five days.  These forces, much like their counterparts in places like the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo, are not “keeping peace” so much as buying time for political agreements to be reached and take full effect, for armed elements to lay down their weapons and for national governments to assume not only control but also responsibility for the well-being of their citizens.

This is not the time or place to review in any detail the current status of peacekeeping operations, including ways in which such operations must be more tightly bound to “good faith” political dialogue, as well as the degree to which “protection” measures run the risk of appearing to be a “partisan” rather than a neutral activity, “taking the side” of the state or a particular party to the conflict.  There are also issues regarding troop reimbursements and equipment procurements that continue to plague at least some of these operations. But what is more important in this space (without assuming motives) is the remarkable sacrifice, the decisions that some make to place themselves in situations where they can remind the desperate and victimized that they are not alone, who choose the service of peace in settings where there is little or no “peace to keep.”

The notion of sacrifice itself now seems “old school” to many, in part because we have allowed ourselves to be overly determined by “preferences,” personal to be sure but also professional.   There is a Subway sandwich commercial now playing over and over on the few television shows I have the time to watch, in which the words “I want” crop up endlessly in the jingle accompanying the imagery.  Far beyond the food industry, “wants” it seems are being reduced at an accelerated pace to the immediate objects of our desire, more about fulfilling a craving than defining a relationship let alone a purpose.

Moreover, it seems, we have become more and more disconnected from the people who have made these often difficult choices to serve and protect. We might take the time to “honor” those who fight our fires, drive our emergency vehicles, report on dangerous conflicts and human rights abuses, or keep erstwhile “enemies” at bay, but we generally have little interest in the practical details of their lives, what it takes for men and women — often inspired by those who love and support them—to choose to place themselves in harm’s way for the sake of others, including “others” choosing to pursue “what they want” with hardly a second thought.

Even in the small sessions this week with the UN Treaty Body chairs, people who have indeed made choices to serve and defend the rights of others, there was evidence of this tendency to petition the skills and authority of others without sharing their sometimes considerable burdens. Indeed, some of the few NGOs who attended the Treaty Body meetings this week got a bit of blowback from the chairs, one of whom remarked a bit tongue-in-cheek that every time NGOs share their thoughts “we end up with more work to do.” The human rights pillar of the UN’s mission continues to buckle, in part because a lot of genuinely good and talented people have yet to fully master our “sharing of service” burdens, the requirement to participate more directly in the challenging and at times even dangerous activities undertaken “in our name.”

Over and over during the Hammarskjöld honoring ceremony, attention was given to the urgent need to increase peacekeeper safety including highlighting all that DPKO is proposing to better ensure that troops and other personnel sent to the field are returned intact to their families and communities.  Appropriate equipment would help.  Flexible command authority in the field would as well.   And certainly the Security Council can do more to ensure that peacekeeping mandates are clear, attainable and tied to both viable political negotiations and timely exit strategies.

But there is more to examine here, the culture behind the logistics.  We have written often (as have others) about the UN’s general propensity for being “slow on the uptake,” in terms of its attentiveness to potential conflict situations.  For instance, we and colleagues have been calling attention for some time to the still-ignored dangers of a wider conflict in Cameroon, but also to the cultural issues that prevent situations like this one from receiving UN attention at a stage when conflict is most likely to be contained.

Some of this problem will hopefully be resolved as the SG’s reform proposals for the UN’s peace and security pillar are rolled out.  But some is related to the institutionalized resistance of the UN system to invest in domestic security concerns until they have clearly reached a boiling point.  In this instance, the creeping tensions within states like Cameroon can be likened to someone with a smoking addiction.  Smokers might be told over and over by doctors, friends and others to quit their habit, but refuse the advice until the first cancer screens come back positive, at which point they frantically seek assistance from the very persons whose advice they originally scorned.

This pattern, one which has permitted so much pain and grief in the wider world, must give way to a system characterized by greater levels of institutional trust, better early warning and conflict prevention skills, and a greater commitment to the service which is indeed at the heart of the joy and meaning of life, helping to ensure that smokers can lay down their cigarettes before they need to consult an oncologist.

One of the most “liked” lines on our twitter feed this week came courtesy of the Department of Field Support which reminded the Hammarskjöld Ceremony audience that “the best way to honor the memories of fallen peacekeepers is to renew the commitment to peace that motivated their sacrifices.”  But beyond that, we should consider expanding our commitment to the service of others, service that the times now calls for and on which our own lives depend, service that can make available the skills and “grace” needed to build the sustainable peace that many millions worldwide now long for.

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State Fair:  The UN Tries to Take another Bite out of Corruption, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 May

Srebrenica

The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people’s children. Marian Wright Edelman

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 but it was a very corrupting business.   Ernest Hemingway

When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose? Anne Bishop

Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.  Suzy Kassem

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

This past Wednesday, the UN General Assembly payed tribute to the 15th anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, a seminal moment in the multi-faceted history of UN efforts to provide pragmatic and regulatory  coherence in global efforts to address crimes from state bribery to terror financing.  This Convention has many facets, some of the most important of which have clear implications for peace and security as well as for our sustainable development priorities, including the recovery of diverted assets, enhancing the fairness and transparency of national judiciaries, and eliminating economic crimes such as identity theft.

Wednesday’s high-level event brought together senior UN officials and minister-level representatives from several  states who shared insights on their own anti-corruption efforts which (they hoped) would inspire other states to both learn from successful national practices elsewhere but also to commit more deeply to coordinated efforts within the broader UN system to stay one step ahead of (or at least better than one step behind) the evolution of contemporary criminal activity — what has become an evil cousin of our otherwise extraordinary ability to manipulate the external world.

If nothing else, our species continues to demonstrate the maxim that if not always wise, we are most certainly clever, an attribute that seems to be in our DNA and that allows the more malevolent among us to run one step (and sometimes many) ahead of our global regulatory capacity. As with weapons development and climate impacts, we often seem often to be running breathlessly in an effort to “catch up” to the latest iteration of criminality:  cyber-crime and off-shore financial shelters; “dark web” trafficking networks and clandestine markets for cultural artifacts pilfered by terrorists.   This race is made more challenging — and perhaps even more urgent — by the fact that enforcement agencies have an important obligation to “play by the rules,” to respect the human rights of persons some of whom have turned the exploitation of human greed and our other physical and character vulnerabilities into an art form.

Many of these challenges (and successes) were on display during the main Wednesday event as well as in a couple of excellent side events including one on “wildlife trafficking” sponsored by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and states including Germany and Gabon.  For instance, a judge from Italy took the floor to cite what he feels are “profound” and positive changes within and beyond his country  due to its participation in the Convention, including transparency in public procurement, protection of “whistle-blowers” and what he deemed “better asset recovery measures.”  On the other side of the ledger, Uganda lamented that the power of money to motivate law enforcement and other officials “to turn a blind eye” to bribery, trafficking and other corrupt practices seems to be holding its own.  And yet there was virtual unanimity regarding claims by UNODC of the degree to which eliminating corruption positively impacts virtually all development and peace and security responsibilities. These include our ability to create and enforce fair and transparent tax codes as well as to regulate access to natural resources and other public goods in ways that preserve and enhance the ability of states to preserve domestic revenue for domestic needs.

As a representative from the Mexican government claimed this week, if we truly wish to honor these responsibilities, our “only option” as an international community is to cultivate more engaged citizens and more transparent and honest governance.  In implementing this “option” it is important to examine a few assumptions.   When many of us think about corruption, we have images from popular media in our heads:  secret payoffs to law enforcement, blatant manipulations of our court systems, corporate bribes to heads of state, the “laundering” of formerly public assets and the creation of safe havens for those ill-begotten gains.  It is about the power of money and might to divert us from any semblance of fairness, a principle which has largely fallen on hard times, but one which still has currency in our modern culture, especially by those who face discrimination or whose well-being has been undermined by select “dirty dealing” from corporate interests, from officials of governments large and small, even from schools and cultural institutions.

Beyond our video screens, it is apparent that corruption is not only a problem for states and the financial vultures that circle around them, but also for our local cultures and communities.  The damage to our societies – and now perhaps even to our planet – though the diversion of public assets to private interests, but also through our inability to rigorously apply principles of fairness in our public policies, is of course most dangerous when the offending party is a state agency or multinational corporate interest.

But there is also a fear, and not unfounded, that too many state officials are both enabling and benefiting from societies full of persons and institutions that also don’t or won’t commit to “play it straight.”  We have collectively become too comfortable with the smaller and seemingly  less consequential ways in which we cheat others, manipulate the truth, and even elevate the competitive advantages associated with our narrow self-interests.  We rightly lament those who use money and power to “cut the line” with impunity, but such lament is often two parts jealousy to one part indignation as we are less concerned about ending the practice of “line cutting”  and more about the strategies we must pursue to ensure our own place at the front of the queue. We must not deceive ourselves here: corruption at local levels is an equal opportunity corroder of our collaborative potential.  And much like Smokey Bear urges about forest fires in the US, “only we” can prevent our further collective slide into an abyss where we expect too little of our leadership and much too little of ourselves as well.

During the wildlife trafficking event on Wednesday, UNODC noted somberly that “we won’t get a second chance” to eliminate wildlife crimes, a warning made more poignant by recent stories of human-exacerbated extinctions that reach far beyond the species targeted by poachers.   But in some sense we might not get a second chance on any corruption-related matters.  If we are to make the best of the chance we still have, we will all need to play our part – as attentive critics of state practices, but also of our own local cultures of corruption. The “engagement” of citizens on corruption to which Mexico rightly pointed this week is partially about the ways we insist that officials in national capitals and multilateral institutions like the UN “play it straight,” and partially about how “straight” the rest of us are willing to play as well.

This weekend in the US is a time to reflect on those who lost their lives in wars of greater and lesser legitimacy.  However one assesses such conflicts and the damage they caused (or prevented), and despite the diverse motivates that drove people to “don the uniform,” we can presume that my relatives and the many others whose often obscure graves mark their sacrifices did not perish so that honor and law could go their separate ways, so that corrupt officials could line their own pockets, so that others could “cut the line” of their surviving family members, or so that the best of our minds and characters could be trampled on by the “dirty feet” of others.

 

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Animal Planet:  The Rule of Law and the Recovery of What Makes us Human, Dr. Robert Zuber

20 May

Orangutang

People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up. George Martin

The technical revolution has turned us into a virus consuming all living organisms. Edward Burtynsky.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We have a problem when the same people who make the law get to decide whether or not they themselves have broken it. Michelle Templet

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. Hilary Mantel

There were so many highlights (and lowlights) in our policy centers this week, actions that fed the soul competing with others that reminded us (or should have anyway) that we are not quite as clever or virtuous as we might otherwise be tempted to believe.

One lowlight for me was a statement by the US president (doubled down by his press secretary) referring to some illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes as “animals.”

This is a toxic formulation that was common in the blue collar households of my childhood.  “Animals” constituted a label that could be placed on anyone who behaved in a manner inconsistent with what “we” believed was right and appropriate.  “We” after all were the guardians of the good, the ones on whom had been bestowed special divine favor, the ones whose “civility” was under assault from hordes of uncouth, ill-mannered, lazy “others.”  “We” generally lacked the wherewithal to remove such people from our midst; so we regularly, it seemed at the time, removed ourselves from theirs.

We are living in a time when such demons that had been allegedly bottled up for years have now made a stark reappearance; indeed many have been shocked to discover that the tops on those bottles had not been screwed nearly as tight as we had imagined.   Some of us have openly scrutinized the limitations of the “polite culture” of which we have long been suspicious, only to discover that our recovering “honesty” is too-often leading, not to opportunities for intimacy, innovation and personal growth, but to occasions for brutality, selfishness and distrust.   What we have released from these bottles is more venom than virtue, more condemnation than compromise.

The irony of this otherwise cruel and debased “animal” characterization is that, to some degree or other, it applies to all of us.   We all seem to participate, one way or another, in predispositions to predation and self-interest.  We often crave predictability, comfort and attention. We tend to feel threats even when no threats are imminent, and ignore most of the challenges threatening to blow our metaphorical houses to the ground.  We often cave in to yearnings and addictions.  We see what we want to see or, more and more, what we have been externally manipulated to see.

And yet there are times when being an “animal” would probably elevate our collective practice.  Animals after all don’t kill for pleasure.   Animals don’t systematically destroy the habitats on which they depend.   Animals don’t enable the extinction of other species that form the food chain that ensures their own survival.  Animals don’t diminish the savvy or “intelligence” of the life forms with which they share an ecosystem.

As we know, much of the history of philosophy and religion in both “west” and “east” has struggled with the “human” dimensions of human nature.  Are we merely animals with larger brains and the appetites to match, or is there something different about us, something that we should cherish and practice more, something that gives us hope that we can stifly our violent proclivities and avoid the extinction that we have so callously set in motion elsewhere on our fragile planet?

This is no time to rehearse this struggle (though I would be happy to do so with any of you off-Blog), but it is worth noting here the degree to which, in my own faith tradition at least, “sanctification” has impeded thoughtful practice.   My tradition has too often adjudicated our disjointed “nature” by alleging and emphasizing our divine entitlements.  Much like our claims for moms and dads, “God” apparently really does like us best, even when we bury the memory, reason and skill under a cloud of suspicion and acrimony.  Under this rubric, “God” apparently forgives of our behavior a priori, even when such behavior leads to gross injustices and abuses for which forgiveness is rarely sought.  “God” apparently exempts some from scrutiny by virtue of some cache of unearned blessing, a form of plenary indulgence that allows we so endowed to believe that the laws and norms that seek to regulate and even inspire the human community simply don’t apply to us, that our “exceptionalism” (a term not confined to the US) allows us to indulge ourselves what we vigorously refuse to others, to demand apologies from others as we too-often dodge the responsibility to acknowledge our own transgressions.

This “do as I say, not as I do” reflection of our erstwhile “providential” exemptions holds many consequences for UN practice.   After all, the UN functions most effectively when it provides consensus norms to guide and rationalize state conduct and when it upholds what many diplomats referred to this week in a Security Council debate on rule-of-law as our “rules-based order.”  Such an order, at and beyond face value, posits many positive implications for peace and security, even when that order is being willfully abrogated. Such implications include the following:

  • Helping to inspire collaborative and supportive activity among state and non-state actors in areas such as migration governance, ocean health, pandemics and counter-terror;
  • Helping to identify and address threats to the peace towards which the international community has a fully legitimate and compelling interest, such as the use of chemical weapons, the commission of mass atrocities or the destruction of a healthy climate;
  • Helping reassure states that all are playing by the same rules, addressing trust deficits caused by power imbalances, economic inequalities and discriminations of many varieties, while also ensuring (as Ireland did this week) that the rule-of-law is not subtly (or visibly) replaced with the considerably less attractive “rule-by-law”;
  • Helping restore confidence in all but the most cynical that we retain the human capacity to rise above narrow, partisan interests and predatory practices and affirm a world where respect, cooperation, thoughtfulness and generosity proliferate.

This is quite a “haul,” and all much needed.  But as this week’s discussions in various UN conference rooms made plain, we still have work to do to create a policy framework that can reinforce and utilize the best of our “human nature.”

There was much in the recent Council debate on rule of law –convened perhaps a bit ironically by Poland’s president Duda — that provided good insight, including Italy’s assertion that disregarding international norms is particularly dangerous in a world awash in weapons, South Africa’s reminder that the rule of law itself does not protect people but only its implementation, Mexico’s insistence that we reject the creeping notion of an “acceptable level” of civilian casualties, Greece’s assertion that “good neighborly relations” is a “common duty” of states, and Brazil’s concern to address the lack of conceptual clarity in international law that leads some states to conclude that armed violence and gross rights abuses can somehow be justified in practice.

Bu there were also reminders of how far we still must travel to create a reliable and robust system that is both trusted by and adhered to by many.  In this, at least two things come to mind, the first of which builds on the strong claim by Ethiopia and others that the Security Council has often “failed miserably” in its responsibility to uphold international law. This failure is due in part to the Council’s imbalanced and sometimes “politicized” application of its own responsibilities, especially in its levels of commitment to the implementation of its own resolutions.  But more than this is the failure of the permanent members to ascribe in practice to the principles of international law that they proscribe for others.  The “exceptionalism” that drives some national policy has its peculiar iteration within this Council in a manner which at times jeopardizes both its own credibility and respect for the Charter of which it is guarantor.

But there is another dimension to note in this context: This week I and others received an important post from the ever-thoughtful Paul Okumu of Kenya, who chided NGOs and others for obsessing on the low hanging fruit of how we use technology to do our organizational bidding while failing to see the mass consolidation of power now well underway within the realm of big data, what Kevin Plank has described as “the new oil.” Indeed, big data seems poised to replace capital as the latest essential medium of global power, a power that can, in the words of Toomas Hedrik Ilves, “deduce more about you than Big Brother ever could.”

For all of the benefits of the current data revolution, even given all the people who now register more faith in “code” than in their neighbors, it is sobering to think of the vast concentration of power that can accrue from turning people into digitalized caricatures of human beings, persons willfully accepting manipulation at the hands of those who know more about our material predispositions than we know ourselves.  In this realm as with others, we must insist that the rule of law be proactive as well as protective, helping us anticipate and then address threats such as this one which might otherwise simply overwhelm the remaining vestiges of our common humanity.

For me and our interns, one of the most moving moments of the week was when Bolivia took the floor in the context of the Security Council discussion on the shootings by Israeli forces at the Gaza fence, the meeting at which the now-infamous photo was taken of US Ambassador Haley walking out of the Council chamber as the Palestinian Ambassador began his remarks. Bolivia’s Ambassador didn’t walk out nor did he deem to lecture the Israelis or his Council colleagues.  Instead he sought forgiveness from the Palestinian people for the “humiliations and deprivations” they have experienced over so many years, noting that Monday’s “moment of silence” was for these victims, but equally in mourning for the “ineffectiveness” of the Council’s application of internatonal law.

We who have accepted the responsibilities of policy have much forgiveness to ask. We have failed to always adhere to the laws we promote.  We have failed to point clearly and forcefully to emerging challenges that directly compromise our children’s destiny. And we have largely failed to inspire a higher and more difficult calling in each other, one in keeping with a genuinely human striving to be better protectors, better stewards, better predictors of a common future that we simply must not let slip through our grasp.

We can do better.

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Accompanied Minors: The Gift of a Mother’s Presence, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 May

Africa

Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.  Jodi Picoult

The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that – a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.  Debra Ginsberg

It’s come at last, she thought, the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.  Betty Smith

It’s not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It’s our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.  L.R. Knost

There is much discussion at the UN on a regular basis focused on the horrible circumstances that some children in this world must endure because of the foolishness of older people much like me.  How do we rationalize, inside and outside of policy communities, the fears and abuses that inflict deep scars on the young and that threaten to make in their adult years people more dependent on care – and less able to give it – than could ever be in our best interest?  What should our response be to children when sometimes cruel and heartless life challenges throw a wet blanket over their capacity to alleviate cruelty for others in their latter parts of their life cycle?

But even more common –perhaps less heartless–circumstances also bring pain and uncertainty for the young – the scraped knees, the verbal intimidations at school, the agony of unrequited desire, the moves away from happy homes to cramped and unfamiliar quarters due to declining economic circumstances.   And then there are the children for whom serious disease or accident threatens to snuff out at least some of the potential of lives that have just barely gotten off the ground.

Some of this might sound a bit like “first world problems,” but it also points to a common experience of so many mothers in this world – to kneel at the foot of the metaphorical cross, as it were, able to accompany the pain of a child’s crucifixion but unable to significantly impact its circumstances.  This accompaniment can be both a great gift and an extraordinary act of courage –easing the necessary and often difficult transitions through the mere grace of presence.

We focus much attention – though probably not enough – on the physical pain and psychic disability that life’s conditions inflict on too many children.  But what of the ones who have committed to bear witness to those lives?  What of the mothers who must engage the eyes of children seeking relief from fear and pain that is beyond their singular capacity to deliver?   Indeed, what of the mothers who can do little but watch in sorrow as the world turns their babies into soldiers, or victims of abuse, or hustlers on unpredictable and even unforgiving streets?

These are the sorts of things I think about when sitting in meetings such as last week’s Security Council Arria Formula discussion intended to review policy progress on ending abuses against children in African states, including and especially their vulnerability to recruitment into such “adult” activities as armed conflict.  Such progress is welcome, of course, as we have clearly not done enough to reassure and protect children from powerful, if metaphorical earthquakes followed by what seem to be for too many, a series of connected aftershocks – the bombing that leads to displacement, that leads to food insecurity, that leads to border hostility and even family separation.

Of course these seismic shifts impact more than just children themselves. What toll do they also take on those parents who seek truly to accompany the lives of these children, who have hopes for their children as we have for ours; who have dreams for their children that they will do well to meet only by fraction?  How do we better support those parents – those mothers – whose hearts have been laid bare through their deep connection with those whom they have born, hearts which are so often in grave danger of being broken in two by the endless shaking of their fragile world?

During the Arria Formula discussion on “action plans” to prevent violence against children, the Netherlands smartly noted the growing disregard for international law that creates the backdrop for so many child abuses, which they then rightly identified as threats to international peace and security.  In the same vein, Sweden (which has been a leading member of the Security Council in calling attention to children’s issues) reminded other members that progress on children’s well-being now will significantly enhance our longer-term efforts to sustain the peace.

Fortunately, as Chad and a few other states noted, we have in fact made some progress on ending child recruitment into the “service” of armed violence, freeing more children from such “service” in both government and non-government forces.  We are also doing a better job at disarming children and reintegrating them into society, providing them with educational and psychological opportunities necessary to growth and healing.  This is all good and hopeful, and many parts of the UN system, including UNICEF, the office for Children and Armed Conflict, and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, should rightly take a bow.

But the circumstances that cause children to plead for comfort and relief from their parents – their mothers – can run far deeper than recruitment.

The accompaniment chosen by so many mothers; a consistent presence through the various stages of child dependency and continuing past the time that we can still deliver those we love from life’s heartaches; this is the special gift and responsibility that we honor on this day.   A commitment by the rest of us to alleviate the miseries of children who must one day assume leadership for our threatened planet is essential for children themselves, but also for those parents– those mothers– who too often are left to suffer in silence the burdens that accrue from a fully exposed heart beholding the pain and longing of children that at times must simply seem too difficult to bear.

More than flowers and cards, more than running a load of laundry and emptying the sink of dishes, many mothers could use a hand – including by all who try to make good policy at places like the United Nations– to do more to calm the tremors that create so much fear and anxiety for so many children, quakes to which those who accompany their journey are compelled to respond but for which there is often no effective or satisfying answer. Today is a good time for all of us to pledge to make a world better fit for children, but especially to honor the mothers who skilfully accompany their young – in all of their joy, pain and anxiety — until that elusive calm is reached.

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A Wobbling Stool: Stabilizing the UN’s Human Rights Obligations, Dr. Robert Zuber

6 May

Handcuffs

The purpose of torture is not getting information. It’s spreading fear. Eduardo Galeano

Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.  Elie Wiesel

We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought. Kathryn Stockett,

Human rights are praised more than ever – and violated as much as ever. Anna Lindh

The UN witnessed a few positive milestones this week, including the presentation of “vision statements” by candidates to become the next president of the General Assembly.  In this rare instance the candidates (from Honduras and Ecuador respectively) were both women, thereby guaranteeing that this often fiscally-challenged and programmatically-burdensome office – a point reinforced earlier this month by current president Lajčák – will transition to female leadership  for one of the few times in the UN’s history.

For its part, the Security Council under Poland’s presidency went on mission to Myanmar and Bangladesh to survey first-hand the human wreckage from abuses we collectively did not do enough to prevent.  Such missions serve as a “reality check” for this Council that is increasingly (and appropriately) under pressure from the general membership to up its game – to invest more in conflict prevention, leave politics at the chamber doorways, and work more collaboratively with the UN agencies tasked with bring core “triggers” of conflict – including rights abuses – to heel.  The Council is not as hostile to human rights as is sometimes claimed, and attention to context in places like Cox’s Bazar and the Lake Chad Basin reinforces for members that development, rights and security deficits represent urgent, interlinked and comprehensive responsibilities.

But the past week also brought difficult issues to consider and lessons that we still need to learn, poignant reminders of how many people remain under threat in this world and how much further we need to travel in order to make a world that is more equal, more inclusive, more respectful of each other and our surroundings, even more mindful of our own “contributions” to a world we say, over and over, is actually not the world we want.

Institutional dimensions of this threat were evident on Wednesday in a small UN conference room filled mostly with NGOs. At that meeting, two officials of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) — ASG Gilmour and NY office director Mokhiber – led a somber discussion on what they referred to as a “human rights backlash,” citing in this regard resistance to human rights by some Security Council members, an unwillingness to address the core funding needs of the human rights “pillar,” member state inattentiveness to requests for investigations by special rapporteurs, and attempts by a shocking number of states to link the activities of human rights advocates (and even in some cases of UN officials) to those of the “terrorists.”

Also expressed was the concern with “double standards” on human rights, including the proclivity of many states to scream about some abuses while remaining utterly silent about others, a cocktail of righteous indignation and willful indifference too-often characteristic of UN culture within and beyond the Security Council. A version of this, of course, could apply to much of the NGO community as well, defending our positions in the rooms where “our” issues are under consideration but withholding the contributions we could be making to policy interlinkages and even at times acting as though three-legged analysis and advocacy is an interesting fad rather than a core dimension of our Charter-based responsibility.  As stressed by OHCHR at this meeting, the human rights community needs some sort of “firewall” to protect it from unwarranted state influence. We NGOs need to invest more in building that wall and otherwise commit to protecting the integrity of each other’s (and the UN’s) advocacy space.

But that firewall is still very much a work in progress as was clear during this week’s World Press Freedom Day, a sobering affair given the recent bombing of journalists in Kabul alongside a spate of other threats to journalists around the world – threats to the integrity of their work but also to their physical safety.

This was not at all a happy event.  Speaker after speaker reminded the audience of the shrinking safe space for journalistic activity, and of the extent to which threats to the press are often mirrored by (or are a precursor for) the erosion of other rights and civil liberties.   Journalists who have lost their lives while pursuing important stories were rightly honored and special mention was made of the often-courageous role of “fixers,” those with knowledge of the local “terrain” who provide guidance and safety for outside journalists, but often with significant personal and family risk.  And there were stark reminders, including from a CBC journalist, that “lies and propaganda” are most likely to fill the gap left when journalists are jailed or otherwise intimidated. As Austria’s Ambassador Kickert chimed in, “power intoxicates” and “un-harassed” journalists are essential if we are to finally curb corruption and other rights abuses as well as fulfill our responsibilities to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Finally of note regarding the complexities of our current human rights responsibilities, there was the event on Thursday sponsored by Japan on rights abuses in North Korea (DPRK),  an event that focused on the often heart-rendering pain of persons who have lived through the abduction of family members by DPRK agents.  The sorrow and uncertainty of “disappearances” is something we address through our affiliation with Paris-based FIACAT and it is no small matter to much of the human rights community.

Against the backdrop of high-level discussions on a possible de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula, the event also served as a rightful reminder that human rights cannot become a “bargaining chip” to a peace agreement, “freezing” past and current abuses in place without an insistence on accountability.  And it is not unreasonable, as has been the case with other peace negotiations, to demand a full accounting and release of those previously disappeared and perhaps imprisoned.  But the sometimes agonizing choices associated with this peace-rights linkage went largely unaddressed under an avalanche of anti-DPRK rhetoric that often sounded more professional and less ideological than it actually was. Where, we wonder, does the abductions issue in all of its heartbreak fit on the scale of human rights concerns to be taken up in the context of peace negotiations? As noted this day by OHCHR’s Mokhiber, while human rights accountability must not be sacrificed to any peace agreement, we must remind ourselves of the centrality of armed conflict to contemporary rights abuses, abuses that a confrontation involving modern nuclear weapons would likely multiply beyond our imagination.

As I am writing this, the Carillion bells of the Riverside Church are pealing yet again, a weekly beckoning to me of the road I have yet to travel – that we all have yet to travel – in order to build a world able to resolve our current conflicts, ensure tolerance and respect among peoples, and offer sustainable options for our children.  Such a world is possible only if we are resolved to tightening the screws on our now-wobbling human rights leg, but are also committed to a fully inclusive agenda that moves closer to “the center of the universe” the safety, health and equity that we have yet to sufficiently and comprehensively promote.  And it means being more thoughtful and interactive as we resolve the sometimes agonizing choices and challenges that call us to consider the policy “forest” and not only the individual trees.

Above all, we must never become content with the mere praise of human rights while so many rights in so many contexts — in prisons and newsrooms, in trafficking rings and First Nations communities – remain so dangerously elusive.

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Redesigning Peace: Creative Learning from Diverse Local Actors, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Apr

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.  Czesław Miłosz

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat. John Steinbeck

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men. Mary Wollstonecraft

‎It isn’t enough to stand up and fight darkness. You’ve got to stand apart from it, too. You’ve got to be different from it.   Jim Butcher

In some ways, this was a hopeful week for the international community.  The images of Korean leaders greeting each other across the DMZ to start mapping out an end to the Korean War and the possible de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula were remarkable.   There is cause for skepticism here, including with regard to the intentions of the big powers to manipulate the current diplomatic opening, but it our hope that the international community can attentively accompany this still-fragile process rather than seek to exploit it for political “credit” or to enhance economic or military alliances.

At the UN, the president of the General Assembly Miroslav Lajčák set off a fresh series of High Level discussions on “sustaining peace,” yet another UN slogan at one level, but also an overdue opportunity to refresh and reset our security frameworks.  In diverse conference rooms (including the Security Council chamber), states and other stakeholders engaged in what Equatorial Guinea this week called the “redesign” of our collective peace and security architecture, getting out in front of armed conflict and its devastating impacts rather than waiting until defenses of state sovereignty give way to what are generally untimely and expensive pleas for peacekeeping operations and conflict-related humanitarian assistance.   As France put it on Wednesday, once the “gears of conflict” are set in motion, we must find the means to respond sooner and better.

In the end, the value of “sustaining peace” lies in its commitment to both use all the tools and actors at our disposal and to create the capacities and networks that we still need to fully honor our peace and security commitments; commitments considered by many – often tinged with anxiety – constituting what Poland called the “holy grail” of UN policy mandates. As such, one of the most hopeful events of this past week was a side session, hosted by Belgium’s Queen Mathilda, during which women from several African countries made the case for why mediation must command a higher profile in the UN’s conflict toolbox, but also why women are so often well positioned within their communities to adapt such tools to productive conflict prevention ends.

As the GA  High Level event made plain, we have tools still to build and, indeed, a culture of multilateralism still to firm up within which such tools can have power to shift our conflict dynamics.  As evidenced in a speech delivered on Tuesday by H.E. Michael Higgins, the President of Ireland, it is certainly justifiable  to express frustration with our collective incapacity to use the skills already at hand to eliminate violence and poverty, at the same time acknowledging the collective imperative to recover through new tools and urgent actions the “ring of authenticity” of the words we use in this policy space – and sometimes overuse –to lament armed violence and the inequalities and insecurities at community level which too often provide its “oxygen.”

When speaking of the need to overhaul our collective peace and security framework, a favorite term of SG Guterres (as is well known) is “prevention,” a term that is relatively easy to toss around but difficult to apply in practice within an institution where virtually every ray of sunshine is clouded in politics.  We have written much about this notion in earlier years, underscoring the degree to which “prevention” remains a pervasive driver of our family and community lives.  But we have also noted that it has not, except in fits and starts, translated into actionable policy at multilateral levels.  Diplomats who are properly scrupulous about the diet, health care, education and weather-appropriate clothing for their own children are infrequently able to bring those skills and insights into UN conference rooms.

We agree with what the ever-pragmatic Kazakhstan offered this week in the Security Council about prevention:  when we are able to truly implement it, prevention “works, saves lives, and is cost effective.”  And we do understand that drawing analogies from family life to multilateral policy spaces is fraught with difficulty.   Diplomats can be scrupulous with children on the (quite valid) assumption that they are not yet able to make good decisions for their own long term benefit.   With member states, the assumption is closer to the opposite, that states are able and primarily empowered to “handle their own business” until they demonstrate (and then admit) that they cannot manage those responsibilities themselves.  What states want (rightly so) is capacity support for conflict resolution and peacebuilding, but they mostly want it within a framework as noted by many states (and perhaps China most reliably) of full respect for national sovereign interests.

Such is the “dance” that the UN engages as it attempts to honor its diverse peace and security responsibilities.  Despite justifiable hope emanating from Liberia, Colombia and now the Korean peninsula, our peace and security architecture still prompts many to “throw up their hands” at the apparent inability of the system to end settlements in the West Bank, prohibit the bombing of civilians in Yemen and Syria, commit the governments of Mali and South Sudan to honest peace agreement implementation, find justice and relief for the people of Puerto Rico and Haiti, and much more.  The successes are real and most welcome, but the frustrations are numerous and patience with the existing system, at least in some quarters, grows thinner by the week.

But there were encouraging signs this week that we might be on the verge of the kind of renaissance that we have tried in our small way to point towards over several years – an integrated security framework that is as concerned with water as with weapons; as concerned with gender as with the prevention of genocide.  Such a framework is, in some significant ways, the “gift” of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an ambitious “blueprint” for a healthier and more peaceful future wherein by 2030, in our most optimistic expectations, the major triggers of conflict are tamed and the pervasive impacts of violence are healed.

The SDGs give special credence to two important, security-relevant insights to which we probably don’t give sufficient attention:  a practical (and enthusiastic) affirmation of the intrinsic value of multilateralism on the one hand, and the need to make good on our promises to the full integration of global actors on the other.   The first of these was well noted — often with caution—during the dizzying array of events held here in New York this week.  Indeed many states (and many other actors as well) worry  that a “new Cold War” brewing among the major powers, coupled with new concerns over fiscal austerity and the potential escalation of unresolved conflicts, threaten to unravel enthusiasm for behaviors conducive to effective multilateral policy, including as Ethiopia urged this week the reigning in of our “short sided pursuit of national interests.”

But it is the second of these that interests me most, the need to inspire hopeful actions in others, but also to acknowledge and extend the many good works that generally fly under the radar but contribute in their own way to more sustainable futures.  Of all the images of this past week, one of my favorites was the one of truck drivers assembled in formation under a Michigan overpass to deter someone apparently seeking to commit suicide.   Truck drivers, not known as a group for their policy savvy (certainly not when I was driving one), are seen implementing a solution to urgent human need as creative as most of what we routinely accomplish within our policy bureaucracies.   Indeed, these drivers reminded me a bit of the women mediators from Africa and those advocating for justice for Puerto Rico and from indigenous communities – people engaging in hopeful responses to despair or injustice, and likely capable of doing more if we would only set proper places for them at the table.

Despite some appearances to the contrary, there is practical virtue running all through our communities. If a “redesigned” peace architecture is to succeed we must find ways to highlight and enable more of that hopeful and creative energy.

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Dream Catcher: First Nations Address the Community of Nations, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Apr

motherearth4

We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  Chief Seattle

If our prayers were suddenly answered, would be we ready? Or would we look behind us for the familiar things, the people, the habits, the routine?  Joyce Sequichie Hifler

Hold on to what is good, even if it’s a handful of earth.  Pueblo Prayer

Today is Earth Day, and it already promises to be a clear and cool late April day here in New York.

Many who acknowledge the day in more than superficial ways rightly claim that each and every day should be devoted to an examination of our practical values and commitments.  They urge us all to build on the smaller changes we are all-too-willing to make and that might actually deflect attention from the larger shifts in lifestyle that global circumstances now require of us.

Some are able to redirect energies and commitments in ways that are both pragmatic and inspirational.  But too many of us have already fallen off the sustainability wagon, abandoning the harder journey and settling for token gestures of action and rhetoric. Most of us are willing to contribute some part of ourselves to the sustainable future that our children will require, but our habits run deep and in directions (and with values) that in the main hold limited promise for our children’s future.  We struggle to make our small changes based on contexts that are themselves not really conducive to change.

As a First Nations prayer of unknown origins suggests, “We have forgotten who we are,” exploiting to our own ends, distorting our knowledge, abusing our power, seeking security largely for “our own.”  This is a heavy indictment on what is becoming here a lovely spring day, an indictment directed as much at the systems we have evolved as it is towards the minds and souls of individuals too busy resisting their own evolution.

At the UN over these two weeks, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous People has been meeting in its 17th session. We certainly haven’t attended all the discussons, but those we have – both plenary and side events – have added good value.   While a range of issues regarding the health and dignity of indigenous peoples have been raised, the primary focus of the discussion has been on representation – seeking a formal role for indigenous people in the UN General Assembly and other key UN organs with a level of status lying somewhere between that accorded member states and that of NGOs.

For some of the indigenous delegates –and for some of the rest of us – these representational discussions are not new.   In many parts of the world, indigenous peoples struggle to hold their own amidst a barrage of corporate incursions, formal and informal discrimination and government neglect that conspire to threaten livelihoods, languages and the ecosystems on which they depend.   Representatives of these groups – and those who support their diverse concerns – are becoming more and more skilled in linking issues interests and demanding rights-based attentiveness in multinational forums.  If the logistics of some “special status” could be successfully addressed – perhaps resulting in “observer” status — indigenous representatives could then experience a greater assurance that states would no longer be able to establish policy to address indigenous issues behind the backs of indigenous people.

This would be a welcome development at several levels.  And yet I wonder (as we do with persons with disabilities who will come later this year and the women who took over the UN for the CSW in February) if the indigenous delegations understand fully what the UN is capable of and what it isn’t?  And, perhaps more importantly, whether these delegations are more likely to change the UN, or to be changed by it?

It is difficult to exist within UN headquarters and not “play by its rules,” accept its political compromises and “thick” protocols. Indeed, were it not for the geographic origins and traditional clothing worn by some delegates, it would be a challenge to discern how this Forum differs from other Commissions.   The rooms and protocols reflect the same dynamics of power and communication.   People from diverse indigenous contexts read prepared statements that in some instances merely serve as a petition for the right to come and read more prepared statements in a wider range of UN conference rooms beyond the Forum itself.  As in other UN settings, the podium drives the process, giving priority to UN agencies and related “experts” seeking to brand their indigenous bona fides, which in some instances are considerable.  But the overall tone seems to serve as a message to indigenous representatives that “you are in the place you need to be,” that this is where the action is for you and “your people.”

I’m not convinced, at least not at face value.   There are few groups at the UN who cover the range of UN processes as we do, and we can confidently report that there is scant discussion of indigenous issues in formal UN settings aside from the two weeks of the Forum.  Moreover, there is little indication that the UN has in any way been impacted by the values that lie at the heart (if not always reflected in practice) of indigenous life.   Our collective resistance to truth telling, especially on matters of peace and security (Yemen is a good case study here); our ability to smooth over the many rough edges of global threat by burying urgency in a garden of bureaucratic consensus; our incessant habit of publicly “thanking” states for statements that in some instances seem as intended to undermine as enable our collective responsibility to peace, rights and development; these and other dimensions of our institutional culture could stand a steadier dose of indigenous perspective.

But such perspective comes with a risk.  As with many people on this Earth Day, our institutional habits here at the UN are highly resistant to change.  And I sometimes fear that the more people line up on First Avenue to get through UN security, the more people who petition to participate in the UN’s institutional habits, working methods and too-often politicized outcomes, the less likely that the cultural changes that we need to see in this policy space will actually come to pass.  Why change when we’re so “popular?”

It is not, of course, the task of indigenous communities to “save the rest of us from ourselves” nor to “fix” institutions that have often neglected indigenous values and interests.  And I am not inclined to sentimentalize the spiritual messaging of indigenous communities any more (or less) than that of their large, western, institutionalized counterparts. But it is not unreasonable to hope that the higher-profile presence of indigenous representatives being sought in all facets of this policy space could actually inspire and impact the way we routinely “do our business” and not merely replicate some of the least effective of our already considerable stable of unaddressed habits.

Certainly the value perspectives are in place within indigenous cultures to help shift our collective course.  In a passage called “Sacred Instructions,” attributed to William Commanda and Frank Decontie, we find a litany of indigenous values and practices that can transform lives, communities and, yes, even bureaucracies:  practicing kindness to self and others, expressing care in all our life settings, thanking the creator at all times, achieving humility as the path to wisdom and understanding, and practicing honesty with self and others.

None of this is easy in an age of competition, personal branding and ambition and none corresponds to any of the UN’s existing “rules of procedure.” Moreover, the mere stating of any aspiration is certainly not sufficient to making it incarnate in the world.  But I am convinced that the planet would be on a more sustainable path if these values and practices were less negotiable within our community, national and global institutions; if some of our complaining could be bathed in thanksgiving; if some of our incessant public relations could adopt a lens of humility; if some of our overly-politicized discourse could defer to our responsibilities to truth telling.

This Earth Day, we have more to do than finding the right colored bin for our ever-less-likely-to-be-recycled waste.  We must instead better prepare to receive the “answer to our prayer,” a prayer for justice and respect, yes, but a prayer for grace to help us cherish the things we have soiled, lift up the things we have brought down, share more of the love we keep hidden behind dispassionate eyes, and risk more honesty within our communities of policy and practice.

And perhaps above all, to hold on to what is good and offer more of what is good to others.

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Position Paper:  Elected Council members reflect on Syria Implications, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Apr

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. Anne Frank

Our lives improve only when we take chances – and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves. Walter Anderson

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it. Oliver Goldsmith

One of the questions I get asked often regards why we don’t take more public stands on key issues of the day?  What is our “position” on the immigration policy of the Trump administration, on arms sales to Yemen or, of most recent vintage, the decision to bomb chemical weapons facilities in Syria?

Having “positions” is valuable in terms of directing organizational energies, finding program partners and explaining to potential funders “what you do” and “where you stand.”

But having “positions” also begs many questions.  For starters, what difference do such positions make?  In the case of the recent Syrian bombing, for instance, the combined skepticism of many “insiders” including the US Secretary of Defense was relatively powerless to force a rethink of the value of the raid let alone to stemming the triumphalism that has followed in its wake.  How would our “position” on the specifics of the raid (we were opposed for the record) have had any tangible impact?

Another of the dangers of having “positions” is that, especially once public, they tend to track towards hard and stubborn edges.  As governments spend too much time defending positions and too little time exploring their lessons, so too do groups like mine tend to defend policy turf that in some instances has long since become a policy swamp.  It is challenging and humbling business to try to stay on top of policy developments while keeping an eye fixed on the world we are trying to enable, the world that we must build if we are to emerge intact from this weapons and xenophobia-obsessed period that has only served to remind us that we are not nearly as clever and “principled” as we imagine ourselves to be.

Among the words you almost never hear at the UN, either by states or by NGOs, are the words “I’m sorry.”  I’m sorry for getting this position wrong and acting like I didn’t.  I’m sorry for keeping my policy commitments carefully “in lane” rather than seeking out a broader picture.  I’m sorry for trying to convince others of things that aren’t true or claiming virtue as the wreckage from my injustices is strewn far and wide.  I’m sorry for (inadvertently or willfully) allowing my funders to cloud my vision.  I’m sorry for trying to make it seem like I have more authority (or impact) than I have.  I’m sorry for not making more of this rare and precious opportunity to shift our current, treacherous path.

This commitment to growth and self-examination, to maximizing benefit regardless of budget, to doing what we can to ensure the health of the institutions that “house” our policy values and not just to the branding of those policies– these are also “positions.”  And as our little team scampers throughout the UN doing our modest part to link policy concerns and examine the security-related implications of issues from oceans to migrants, we never stop being mindful of how little our policy and methodological priorities have yet to find their way into the service of a healthier UN, particularly a UN that is able to trade off some of its politics for truth-telling, truth about where we are as a planet but also truth about our current and collective state of fitness to help address looming threats.

Much of our UN time, certainly this week with all of the discouragement on Syria, is spent in the Security Council.  We are not there, day after day, because we think the Council always functions as it should or always makes the best decisions, or because its members are sufficiently thoughtful regarding roles and responsibilities in what is – arguably at least – the single most important policy room in the world.  We are there to offer our meager support to those several members who are clearly trying to honor the grave responsibilities that have accrued to that chamber – Sweden, Kazakhstan and Equatorial Guinea certainly come to mind from the current configuration — but also to keep track of and provide feed-back on Council decisions and indecisions that are in one or more ways certain to exert pressure on other parts of the UN system.

Those pressures can be considerable.   Failures in the “maintenance” of international peace and security, as we have noted many times, create conflict refugees needing material and psychological assistance, inflict infrastructure and environmental damage that we struggle to remediate, bloat an already massive global arms business which continues to drain national coffers to no sustainable security end, and increase insecurity for vast populations who lament letting their children outdoors for fear of coming in contact with a landmine.  The costs of failures on peace and security are staggering — to which what seems at times to be an endless stream of “pledging conferences” at and around the UN clearly attest.

Moreover, such failures erode trust, not only trust among member states but trust in the viability and legitimacy of the UN system itself.   This is not “news” to anyone who has spoken off the record to diplomats or been on the receiving end of twitter rants from skeptical academics and civil society representatives.  But after all these years it is remarkable how seldom such concerns are raised in UN contexts, how often we “dodge” this essential truth in what are often less-than-effective efforts to convince donor states and media outlets that “all is well,” that the acrimony so often seen at the UN, and especially as our new “Cold War” (to quote the SG this week) now plays itself out in the Security Council, doesn’t quite signify what we all know (and fear) it does.

We gratefully recognize that the UN has gotten some helpful traction on ocean health and migration governance, on gender-based violence and climate impacts. And yet all is clearly not well within or outside our building, a “position” that we are keen to at the very least try to do something about.   In this context we acknowledge that, in ways that are sometimes unexpected, member states are rising up to name and address deficiencies. This includes elected Council members who increasingly refuse to sit idly by as the large powers fuss amongst themselves and spin narratives regarding their pious commitments to “uphold” the erstwhile global order that are, to our mind at least and surely to others, too-often unconvincing.

Amidst all of the political carnage within the Council these past days, meeting after meeting that resulted in no formal rebukes to unilateral bombing raids, no agreement on a mechanism to assess responsibility for gruesome chemical weapons attacks in Douma and elsewhere, and no olive branches extended by any to any, there is just cause for the frustration that Sweden’s Ambassador Skoog has expressed on more than one occasion, a frustration borne of his own and his country’s determined desire to break impasses and restore Council unity in more than the most passive and superficial sense.

But such unity, as several of the elected members noted during this latest Syria marathon, cannot be simply about achieving political consensus but rather must be about fidelity to the values and principles of the UN Charter, the one text that, as Ethiopia reminded, states affirm in common as a precondition of their membership.  And as Kazakhstan made clear this week, the willingness of some states to bypass the Security Council and the Charter, to justify unilateral military action through reference to the appropriately grave matter of chemical weapons use, is to set the UN’s security system on a course that privileges might over preventive diplomacy, a course that only promises more misery, more refugees, more damaged infrastructure, more distrust and hostility, even (to quote Ethiopia) the prospect of “catastrophe beyond imagination.”

For me, the highlight of this Syria marathon was a series of speeches delivered by Ambassador Llorenti of Bolivia, a government that has “sided” with the Russians in the Council more than most other members, though mostly on procedural grounds rather than on policy content.  Llorenti’s speeches laid out several essentials, including the outright illegality of any chemical weapons use, but also called out the major powers for treating the Council like a “game board,” upholding multilateralism only “when it suits their purposes.” We cannot, he exclaimed, “seek to address violations of the UN Charter by committing violations of the UN Charter,” a position taken up by the African states and other elected members who fear that “locked and loaded” states (to quote US Ambassador Haley) will resume habitual practices of doing “what and where they wish.”

From our vantage point, the UN’s security system is in danger of sliding into a deeper pit of acrimony and disrespect that gunships and tomahawk missiles will only exacerbate. Impeding this slide has been and remains our “position” of urgent policy preference.

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Speech Impediment: The Darkness Lurking Behind our Migration Governance Efforts, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Apr

Migraton II

The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. Michel Foucault

A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim. Maya Angelou

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. … Every separation is a link.  Simone Weil

All of us with multiple settings and contexts for our lives understand that forms and contents of our communication tend to vary with our audience.   Few people taking the stage for a presentation use the same language that they would use in a conversation with a loved one or with a familiar shopkeeper.  We don’t often communicate the same around children as we do around those closer to our own demographic.  We don’t generally use the same language in our houses of worship as we do at sporting events. We don’t communicate the same on the streets of places like New York – filled largely with inattentive strangers – as we do back home around people who stake a different claim on the contents of our self-definitions.

Hopefully, it is context and not a will-to-deceive that lies at the heart of these linguistic variances.  In our best sense, we try to establish connection in part by sharing with people what we think they need or can tolerate to hear as a precondition for a deeper and hopefully more trustworthy transaction.  In this current age given to collecting trivial “data” about each other and over-sharing what we think others need to “know” about ourselves, there is perhaps even greater value in mastering the rhythms of transaction, of withdrawal and return, of discerning how best to connect to others, including those most troublesome to ourselves, through attentive and persistent practice.

In our communities of faith, the task is much the same: acquiring diverse tools and strategies to communicate with a range of “others,” trying and failing (and trying again) to establish or regain trust, providing a consistently more comprehensive narrative of meaning to replace the often-petty sound-bites that we seem so reluctant to abandon.  It is a challenge indeed to find the right formula to communicate successfully through the walls that divide us, including and especially walls of our own making. I know of few persons in and out of faith communities who are sufficiently skilled at this.

Of course, communications-related challenges abound in our large public institutions as well. One of the things that you have to get used to around the UN is the sight of diplomats articulating progressive norms – or at least contributing to discussions about such — while events back home in the countries these diplomats represent are sometimes tracking in a very different direction.

While there are certainly “unreasonable” things proposed at the UN – including many statements inside and outside of the Security Council that are less about clarifying policy truths and more about convincing those open to being convinced– the multilateral contexts of the UN suppress somewhat the degrees of aggressive and ethno-centric rhetoric now emanating from more and more global settings.  Statements by diplomats, as we have noted on other occasions, might be redundant and irrelevant, might disrespectfully neglect both established time limits and the obligation to listen to others, but they don’t generally offer rhetorically-direct challenges to core Charter values even if the behavior of states they represent or of a growing number of their constituents suggest something different.

One instance of the divisions between UN diplomacy and national practice was provided during this week’s discussions — kindly and effectively led by the Ambassadors of Mexico and Switzerland — towards a consensus draft of the Global Compact on Migration, a Compact that is being negotiated alongside its “partner” Compact on Refugees, and which represents a potentially important antidote to the chaotic basket of laws and protocols that at times do more to confuse and frighten people than provide predictable pathways to services, employment opportunities and community integration.

As delegations to these Compact discussions surely recognize, their often-“enriching” efforts come at a time when anti-migration sentiment seems to be growing in many parts of the world, including in areas of Central Europe which have spurred numerous news reports of highly-disturbing, public rhetoric promoting “ethnic purity” and in at least one instance disparaging persons co-occupying national territory as “ferocious humanoids.”

Inside the UN, there has thankfully been far less virulent blowback to a largely progressive, non-binding Compact that seeks to regularize migration in ways that work for migrants and for states involved in one or more segments of migration pathways.  Reproaches have largely taken the form of assertions of sovereign interest and have included requests for clarification regarding distinctions between migrants who “choose” to leave and those who do so “irregularly” based on considerations as broad and discouraging as climate impacts (as noted by Tuvalu) or the conflict “refugees” for whom settled international law already exists (if not adequately implemented). There have also been requests for better data on how migrants, in the words of the Compact draft, create economic benefits in both origin and destination states.

If only such benefits were clearer and sufficiently compelling for more people.  If only people like me who attend these meetings could do a better job of both communicating migration benefits and offering solidarity with and support to the growing number of skeptical people worldwide who are being asked to make way for newcomers while too many of the rest of us piously go about our all-too-regular business — bending the arc of what little remains of our global resource base to the benefit “of our own.”

In our policy bubbles and urban penthouses, it seems that some of us  have managed to convince ourselves that, regarding the acceptance and care of regular and irregular migrants, others should “take one for the team,” in too many cases a “team” that has thoroughly marginalized local interests and otherwise failed to honor the promises of a globalized order, a “team” thas has too often acquiesced to an “order” characterized by gross inequalities and equally gross (and mostly unpunished) lapses in judgment by more than a few who benefit most from current conditions.

There is no justification in this (or any other) time for the racist and hateful rhetoric to which we are now witness in settings from Warsaw to Virginia.  But neither is there justification for gas attacks on Syrian citizens, for starvation and siege tactics in Yemen, for snipers shooting unarmed civilians on the borders of Gaza.  Neither is their justification for vast concentrations of wealth and power that offer distractions rather than genuine participation in matters that affect community health and well-being.  While maintaining our lagely respectful and even constructive rhetoric in New York, we have been maddeningly idle as the UN Charter is sliced up by rich and powerful elements to suit their own appetites, persons who then hand the leftovers to “we the peoples” for whom the Charter meal was ostensibly and originally intended.

The UN Migration Agency IOM has rightly called migration governance “one of the most urgent and profound tests of international cooperation in our time.”  And they aptly point to the Compact on Migration as one key promise of effective global governance that can help to establish viable norms for enhancing migrant access and protecting migrant rights. Such rights include access to employment opportunities for adults and public services for children (as highlighted this week by Panama and others) and (as advocated by the Holy See) persons with disabilities. They also include transparent standards for and access to the remittances and pathways to family reunification essential to the well-being of both migrants and persons still residing in countries of origin.

But let’s be clear:  We are much closer to a negotiated Global Compact than we are to finding something closer to common ground with those many thousands marching around the world under banners of hate-filled rhetoric, banners that communicate disdain for our “liberal” priorities and institutions every bit as much as rejection of the “other.”  This represents a massive challenge to the values of many, including most all diplomats here in New York, but even more to the communications skills needed to dialogue effectively with that anger.

But if we are to truly and “profoundly” to cooperate on migration governance, if we truly want to support and maintain healthy flows of people in and out of our societies, then we must do more to identify and address the diverse community contexts and policy uncertainties identified in the Global Compact itself.  And that entails a stronger commitment to adjust our language – even if it means banging on dividing walls – to fulfill the hope articulated within the Global Compact draft, the hope that migration properly governed can truly “unite rather than divide us.”

For those of us for whom repulsion rushes to the surface at the news of yet another “hate rally,” communicating across divides of global policy and angry local marchers is likely to be the hardest bridge to cross. But if we don’t try, if we don’t extend hands of greater opportunity and responsibility, if we fail to use our leverage to recover the human face of both migrants and those determined to reject them, there might well come a time in our not-too-distant future when the walls around us grow so thick that no sound, no matter how wise or conciliatory, will be able to penetrate.

 

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Heart Burn: Words that Consume our Peace and Development Prospects, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Apr

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I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become. Clayton Christensen

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within. Alfred Lord Tennyson

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all. Emily Dickinson

It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Mahatma Gandhi

In the Security Council this month, Dutch Ambassador Karel van Oosterom in his capacity as president of the Council, invoked Provisional Rule 507 on a daily basis, urging Council members and briefers to be succinct and relevant to both the topic under consideration and the flow of the discussion.

For this Council, indeed for almost any discussions held inside the UN, this “507” business is a high bar. Indeed, what Ambassador van Oosterom (and at points in March his Prime Minister and Foreign Minister) requested was merely a small portion of the recommendations that could speed up meetings, avoid redundancy, and most importantly help establish the conditions for actionable policy.  And, while we didn’t bring a stopwatch to Council meetings, there appeared to be no apparent impact on the length or content of statements.  With few exceptions –including some states at Wednesday’s open debate on peacekeeping and an excellent brief at that same meeting by Mali’s Fatimata Touré – states and briefers mostly did what they always do: write what they want and read what they wrote.  If any changes were evident, they were primarily regarding the speed at which prepared statements were read, a frustrating practice which caused more than one headache for our excellent interpreters.

But it is the redundancy of positions that both interests and alarms the interns and fellows who often accompany me in Council chambers, statements prepared in anticipation of briefings rather than in response to them; statements replete with tepid deference to protocol and with only fleeting references to positions taken by Council colleagues; statements that communicate little hope that the future for these (and other) young people will be much different than their current, unsettled prospects.

And what is communicated directly through such statements is only a portion of the full revelation.  While we as an office remain seized of any new ideas or turns-of-phrase that might help clarify a path to peace in places as far-flung as Myanmar, Yemen and Mali, my younger colleagues are even more inclined than I am to interpret the “culture” of Council meetings in a skeptical light– Ambassadors preaching Council unity while habitually branding agendas largely conceived in national capitals; states expressing “concerns” and issuing condemnations that mostly fall on deaf ears; resolutions and presidential statements adopted that have little teeth and that represent political compromise more than an honest and urgent response to conflict threats.

This is the future of my younger colleagues after all, and their level of skepticism can sometimes be alarming regarding the value and potential impact of Council “deliberations.” While they can recognize those times when Council discussions actually open space for peacemaking, they too often witness a hardening of positions and even a choking off of viable options for Council members sincerely seeking to “be deliberate” about the prevention and resolution of conflict or other threats to human well-being.

This weekend as most of you know marks the relative convergence of the Christian feast of Easter (this weekend for the west, next weekend for the east) and the Jewish feast of Passover.  The latter is tied to liberation – in this instance the liberation of Jews from their Egyptian bondage; the former to liberation of another sort – the hope for some kind of life beyond this one, some place of serenity beyond the pain of this world with which we at the UN are at least rhetorically familiar.

Both feasts are replete with powerful images communicated largely through the Easter Eucharist and the Seder.   But while our Easter churches are often full and there are generally few empty seats to be found around our Seder tables, there is something here that doesn’t seem quite right for me.  Simply put, we seem to be celebrating freedom from a bondage with which we have largely lost touch; the hope of some “heaven” that we have mostly not done nearly enough to replicate here on earth.

After all, this time of feasts is also a weekend in which the UN Secretary General complained openly about the slow pace of our collective response to climate change.  This is a weekend as well when bombs continued to fall on Syrian children despite a Council-mandated cease fire, when legitimate protesters along Gaza border regions were gunned down by Israeli troops, when the US decided to block any UN condemnation of such shootings (again assuming that any “condemnations” by this Council actually matter), and when fresh arms sales to erstwhile “allies” promise more violence,  suffering and trauma endured in large measure by “tomorrow’s adults.”

In recognition of the pain which punctuates this ostensibly “holy” weekend, I spent a good bit of this past week looking for inspiration that could properly bind the misery of Good Friday with the hope of Easter Sunday, linking real pain with the hope of deliverance. It was during this search that I came across once again Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford, one of the many books about religion that makes greater sense to those on the margins of faith than those who strive to maintain a more orthodox center.

Some of Spufford’s passages are frustrating; others almost tearfully moving.  His rendition of the Good Friday crucifixion is one of my favorites:

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is.

There will come a time when none of us will be able to do much of anything that is “deliberate.”  Our bodies will betray us.  Our minds will no longer be able to recall the small rituals that lie behind so many of our own utterances, let alone transform the half-heartedness of so many of our actions.  We will be eventually melded to our memories; the things we did that mattered, of course, but also the many things left undone, the opportunities to make change stifled by largely imaginary impediments. We will be left to remember actions that were hopeful and loving, but also the misery we failed to prevent, the damage we inflicted and then overlooked, the freedom we claimed for ourselves and denied to others, the matters we conspired to ignore so that we wouldn’t feel obligated to care, the words we employed to distract our audiences or “sell” them on our half-truths rather than inspire their own deliberate engagement with the world.

This sometimes uncomfortable time of memory may be our destiny but it is not yet our whole reality, not for Spufford nor for the rest of us who labor in places like the UN. For at the conclusion of his litany of human misery and disappointment soaked up by the one who cares so deeply but can no longer be deliberate about very much; and as the sun rises on Easter Sunday revealing confused specialists in stitching and cleaning beholding a seemingly empty tomb, we read the following:

Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.

Yes, far more can be mended than we know. Far more can be healed than we know. Far more can be resolved or prevented than we know.  In this season of holy possibility, let us commit to use this time and our often-formidable gifts to “take in” more of our human condition and then to be more deliberate about our “mending,” about the things we have the capacity and responsibility to fix before our time to fix comes to an end.

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