 November/December 1999 (XXXVII 5) |
uakers from Third Haven Meeting in Easton, Maryland, and Camden Meeting (DE) traveled to New York in April to attend a two-day seminar on the United Nations organized by the Quaker United Nations Office, a non-governmental organization which works to support the mission of the UN.
The seminar was an effort to give the participants a better sense of how the UN operates and how its aims can be implemented. The group met with members of the QUNO staff, other non-governmental staff, UN staff and a delegate from Sweden. This delegate, Elinor Hammarskjold, is First Secretary of the Swedish Mission and the grand niece of Dag Hammarskjold, the first Secretary General of the United Nations. She addressed the role played by Sweden as a rotating (non-permanent) member of the Security Council from January 1997 to December 1998.
During the seminar much of the discussion centered on arms reduction in Africa. (There are thought to be 500 million assault rifles on the continent.) These arms are easily hidden and their use requires very little training. When conflicts arise, it is difficult to tell who is a combatant and who is not. Indeed, soldiers by night are frequently farmers by day. The effort is not only to keep additional small arms from coming into an area, but to keep the arms there from being "recycled." Arms from one conflict, rather than being destroyed after the conflict, show up in the next one. Part of the focus in the pacification of these areas is to give the combatants an incentive to return to their home villages after the conflict is over rather than remain in the urban areas where they are apt to be involved in new unrest.
Some progress has been made on land mines (the Ottawa Treaty outlawing them was signed by 167 nations) primarily because the issue is narrowly drawn and easily understood by the public. The issue of small arms is, however, very hard to get a handle on and requires a far more complex solution. The UN role on this problem could include: making the world aware of the problem; training combatants to do something else; serving as mediator; and collecting and destroying weapons, giving the parties something such as a roads system in return.
The United Nations staff member who spoke to the group is attached to the office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs. This office works to coordinate the efforts of the eight humanitarian organizations attached to the UN, including UNHCR (the commission on refugees, currently very active in Kosovo), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and UNICEF.
The public tends to think of the United Nations in terms of the Security Council and its peacekeeping operations, but there is much more going on, a lot of it aimed at avoiding conflict in the first place. Several speakers addressed the changing role in the UN in the post-Cold War era. The participants came away from these very busy days with a new appreciation for the complexity and difficulty of the problems facing the UN.
Anne L. Rouse
Third Haven Meeting (MD)
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM