Tag: UN

  • A Path to Peace in the Caucasus

    Article originally appeared in the Washington Post

    The past week’s events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone. Already, thousands of people have died, tens of thousands have been turned into refugees, and towns and villages lie in ruins. Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all.

    The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia’s separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia’s territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force — both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar — it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.

    Nevertheless, it was still possible to find a political solution. For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground.

    Through all these years, Russia has continued to recognize Georgia’s territorial integrity. Clearly, the only way to solve the South Ossetian problem on that basis is through peaceful means. Indeed, in a civilized world, there is no other way.

    The Georgian leadership flouted this key principle.

    What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against “small, defenseless Georgia” is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity.

    Mounting a military assault against innocents was a reckless decision whose tragic consequences, for thousands of people of different nationalities, are now clear. The Georgian leadership could do this only with the perceived support and encouragement of a much more powerful force. Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of NATO membership, emboldened Georgian leaders into thinking that they could get away with a “blitzkrieg” in South Ossetia.

    In other words, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was expecting unconditional support from the West, and the West had given him reason to think he would have it. Now that the Georgian military assault has been routed, both the Georgian government and its supporters should rethink their position.

    Hostilities must cease as soon as possible, and urgent steps must be taken to help the victims — the humanitarian catastrophe, regretfully, received very little coverage in Western media this weekend — and to rebuild the devastated towns and villages. It is equally important to start thinking about ways to solve the underlying problem, which is among the most painful and challenging issues in the Caucasus — a region that should be approached with the greatest care.

    When the problems of South Ossetia and Abkhazia first flared up, I proposed that they be settled through a federation that would grant broad autonomy to the two republics. This idea was dismissed, particularly by the Georgians. Attitudes gradually shifted, but after last week, it will be much more difficult to strike a deal even on such a basis.

    Old grievances are a heavy burden. Healing is a long process that requires patience and dialogue, with non-use of force an indispensable precondition. It took decades to bring to an end similar conflicts in Europe and elsewhere, and other long-standing issues are still smoldering. In addition to patience, this situation requires wisdom.

    Small nations of the Caucasus do have a history of living together. It has been demonstrated that a lasting peace is possible, that tolerance and cooperation can create conditions for normal life and development. Nothing is more important than that.

    The region’s political leaders need to realize this. Instead of flexing military muscle, they should devote their efforts to building the groundwork for durable peace.

    Over the past few days, some Western nations have taken positions, particularly in the U.N. Security Council, that have been far from balanced. As a result, the Security Council was not able to act effectively from the very start of this conflict. By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its “national interest,” the United States made a serious blunder. Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone’s interest. But it is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region.

    The international community’s long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible. Building this type of system would be challenging and could only be accomplished with the cooperation of the region’s countries themselves. Nations outside the region could perhaps help, too — but only if they take a fair and objective stance. A lesson from recent events is that geopolitical games are dangerous anywhere, not just in the Caucasus.

    Mikhail Gorbachev was the last president of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and is president of the Gorbachev Foundation, a Moscow think tank.
  • Ten Years of the International Criminal Court

    “For nearly a half a century — almost as long as the United Nations has been in existence — the General Assembly has recognized the need to establish such a court to prosecute and punish persons responsible for crimes such as genocide. Many thought that the horrors of the Second World War — the camps, the cruelty, the exterminations, the Holocaust — could never happen again. And yet they have. In Cambodia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Rwanda. Our time — this decade even— has shown us that man’s capacity for evil knows no limits. Genocide is now a word of our time too, a heinous reality that calls for a historic response.” — Koffi Annan, then UN Secretary-General

    July 17 marks the 10th anniversary of the Diplomatic Conference in Rome that established the International Criminal Court — a major step in the creation of world law. Citizens of the world have usually made a distinction between international law as commonly understood and world law. International law has come to mean laws that regulate relations between States, with the International Court of Justice — the World Court in The Hague — as the supreme body of the international law system. The Internatiional Court of Justice is the successor to the Permanent Court of International Justice that was established at the time of the League of Nations following the First World War. When the United Nations was formed in 1945, the World Court was re-established as the principal judicial organ of the UN. It is composed of 15 judges who are elected by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.

    Only States may be parties in cases before the World Court. An individual cannot bring a case before the Court, nor can a company although many transnational companies are active at the world level. International agencies that are part of the UN system may request advisory opinions from the Court on legal questions arising from their activities but advisory opinions are advisory rather than binding.

    Citizens of the world have tended to use the term “world law” in the sense that Wilfred Jenks, for many years the legal spirit of the International Labour Organization, used the term the common law of mankind: “By the common law of mankind is meant the law of an organized world community, contributed on the basis of States but discharging its community functions increasingly through a complex of international and regional institutions, guaranteeing rights to, and placing obligations upon, the individual citizen, and confronted with a wide range of economic, social and technological problems calling for uniform regulation on an international basis which represents a growing proportion of the subject-matter of the law.” It is especially the ‘rights and obligations’ of the individual person which is the common theme of world citizens.

    The growth of world law has been closely related to the development of humanitarian law and to the violations of humanitarian law. It was Gustave Moynier, one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a longtime president of the ICRC who presented in 1872 the first draft convention for the establishment of an international criminal court to punish violations of the first Red Cross standards on the humane treatment of the sick and injured in periods of war, the 1864 Geneva Convention. The Red Cross conventions are basically self-enforcing. “If you treat my prisoners of war well, I will treat yours the same way.” Governments were not willing to act on Moynier’s proposition, but Red Cross standards were often written into national laws.

    The Red Cross Geneva conventions deal with the way individuals should be treated in time of war. They have been expanded to cover civil wars and prisoners of civil unrest. The second tradition of humanitarian law arises from the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and deals with the weapons of war and the way war is carried on. Most of the Hague rules, such as the prohibition against bombarding undefended towns or villages, have fallen by the side, but the Hague spirit of banning certain weapons continues in the ban on chemical weapons, land mines and soon, cluster weapons. However, although The Hague meetings made a codification of war crimes, no monitoring mechanisms or court for violations was set up.

    After the First World War, Great Britain, France and Belgium accused the Central Powers, in particular Germany and Turkey of war atrocities such as the deportation of Belgian civilians to Germany for forced labor, executing civilians, the sinking of the Lusitaniaand the killing of Armenians by the Ottoman forces. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919 provided in articles 227-229 the legal right for the Allies to establish an international criminal court. The jurisdiction of the court would extend from common soldiers to military and government leaders. Article 227 deals specifically with Kaiser Wilhelm II, underlining the principle that all individuals to the highest level can be held accountable for their wartime actions. However, the USA opposed the creation of an international criminal court both on the basis of State sovereignty and on the basis that the German government had changed and that one must look to the future rather than the past.

    The same issues arose after the Second World War with the creation of two military courts — the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Some have said that these tribunals were imposing ‘victors’ justice on their defeated enemies, Germany and Japan. There was no international trial for Italians as Italy had changed sides at an opportune time, and there were no prosecutions of Allied soldiers or commanders.

    In the first years of the United Nations, there was a discussion of the creation of an international court. A Special Committee was set up to look into the issue. The Special Committee mad a report in 1950 just as the Korean War had broken out, marking a Cold War that would continue until 1990, basically preventing any modifications in the structure of the UN.

    Thus, during the Cold War, while there were any number of candidates for a war crime tribunal, none was created. For the most part national courts rarely acted even after changes in government. From Stalin to Uganda’s Idi Amin to Cambodia’s Pol Pot, war criminals have lived out their lives in relative calm..

    It was only at the end of the Cold War that advances were made. Ad hoc international criminal courts have been set up to try war crimes from former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. Just as the Cold War was coming to an end, certain countries became concerned with international drug trafficking. Thus in 1989, Trinidad and Tobago proposed the establishment of an international court to deal with the drug trade. The proposal was passed on by the UN General Assembly to the International Law Commission, the UN’s expert body on international law. By 1993, the International Law Commission made a comprehensive report calling for a court able to deal with a wider range of issues than just drugs — basically what was called the three ‘core crimes’ of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

    By the mid-1990s, a good number of governments started to worry about world trends and the breakdown of the international legal order. The break up of the federations of the USSR and Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, the breakdown of all government functions in Somalia, the continuing north-south civil war in Sudan — all pointed to the need for legal restraints on individuals. This was particularly true with the rise of non-State insurgencies. International law as law for relations among States was no longer adequate to deal with the large number on non-State actors.

    By the mid-1990s, the door was open to the new concept of world law dealing with individuals, and the drafting of the statues of the International Criminal Court went quickly. There is still much to be done to develop the intellectual basis of world law and to create the institutions to structure it, but the International Criminal Court is an important milestone.

    René Wadlow is the Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens and the editor of the online journal of world politics and culture www.transnational-perspectives.org
  • UN Voting on Nuclear Disarmament Shows Abysmal US Record

    UN Voting on Nuclear Disarmament Shows Abysmal US Record

    Each year the United Nations considers resolutions that seek to limit, control or eliminate the dangers that nuclear weapons pose to the inhabitants of the planet. In general, these resolutions can be described as nuclear disarmament measures.*

    In 2007, in the 62nd General Assembly of the United Nations, 20 resolutions on nuclear disarmament were considered. Of these, five were not voted upon. Of the 15 resolutions that were voted upon by the UN General Assembly in 2007, only one country in the world, the United States, had a record of opposing all of them. It is an abysmal voting record, and the people of the United States should be aware of the dangerous and obstructionist role their government is playing in opposing a serious agenda for nuclear disarmament.

    The votes of the nine nuclear weapon states are listed in the chart below. Countries were given one point for each Yes vote, zero points for each abstention, and a point was taken away for each No vote:

    China Pakistan N. Korea India Russia UK Israel France US
    Yes (+1) 11 10 11 8 5 3 1 2 0
    No (-1) 0 0 2 3 1 9 8 10 15
    Abstain (0) 4 5 0 4 8 3 6 3 0
    Vote Tally 11 10 9 5 4 -6 -7 -8 -15

    United States

    In three of the votes, the United States was the only country in the world to vote against the resolutions. The resolutions called for:

    1. Giving security assurances to non-nuclear weapons states that nuclear weapons would not be used against them;
    2. Supporting the Treaty on the South-East Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone;
    3. Supporting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to permanently end all nuclear weapons testing.

    Four other resolutions had only three votes against, and in each case the US was one of the three. These resolutions called for:

    1. Supporting a nuclear-weapon-free southern hemisphere (US, France, UK opposed);
    2. Decreasing the operational readiness of nuclear weapons systems (US, France, UK opposed);
    3. A UN conference on eliminating nuclear dangers (US, France, UK opposed);
    4. Supporting renewed determination toward the elimination of nuclear weapons (US, India, North Korea opposed).

    France & United Kingdom

    The other nuclear weapons states had more positive voting records, although in the case of the UK and France, only slightly more so. Both France and the UK voted Yes on a resolution highlighting the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and on supporting for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The UK’s other Yes vote was on renewed determination towards elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Russia & China

    Russia’s sole No vote was on supporting the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the illegality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. Of the five principal nuclear weapons states, China had by far the best voting record, casting no negative votes.

    Israel, India, Pakistan & North Korea

    The other nuclear weapons states, those outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, are Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Israel cast only one Yes vote, on support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. India, Pakistan and North Korea were more supportive of nuclear disarmament resolutions, voting Yes a majority of the time. North Korea did not vote on two resolutions.

    Weapons in Space

    One other aspect of UN voting on disarmament measures deserves comment, that of disarmament aspects of outer space. On the two measures on this subject, the countries of the world voted overwhelmingly in favor of keeping outer space free of weapons. The first vote was on prevention of an arms race in outer space. Out of 180 countries voting on this resolution, 179 voted in favor. Only the United States voted against and Israel abstained. On the second measure on transparency and confidence building in outer space, 181 countries voted. Again, only the US voted against the measure, and only Israel abstained.

    In the area of nuclear disarmament, as well as in keeping outer space free of weapons, the US has shown itself to be an obstacle to progress. In a time when the world badly needs leadership toward a saner and safer future, the US has chosen to oppose progress on nuclear disarmament in many ways, including its votes in the UN General Assembly.

    In many respects the US government has demonstrated by its votes in the UN General Assembly its disdain for the deep concerns of the vast majority of the rest of the international community as well as of the American people. Such behavior leaves the US and the world a more dangerous place and undoubtedly contributes to the extremely low level of respect in which the US is held throughout most of the world.

    * The voting records of countries on these resolutions can be found in the Winter 2007 issue of Disarmament Times, a publication of the NGO Committee on Disarmament, Peace and Security.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.


  • Is Peace that Difficult?

    Reprinted from The Age, August 28, 2007 edition.

    At the end of the Cold War there was an opportunity for the world to create a new collective security order. In 1991, after decades of blockages in the Security Council, it authorized armed intervention to stop the Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. In the same period, Russia and the United States took steps to reduce the number of deployed non-strategic nuclear weapons: the Chemical Weapons Convention was adopted in 1993, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was prolonged indefinitely after renewed commitments by nuclear weapon states to take get serious about disarmament; a Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty was negotiated and adopted in 1996; and at the review conference of the NPT in 2000, countries agreed on 13 practical steps to disarmament.

    But the window of opportunity soon closed. The US embarked on unilateralism. In 2003, the UN Security Council was said to be irrelevant if it did not agree with the US and its coalition of the willing.

    By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, US confidence and trust in international negotiations, particularly in dealing with disarmament issues, was at a record low. And tensions continue to grow. Instead of negotiations towards disarmament, nuclear weapon states are renewing and modernizing their nuclear arsenals.

    In 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear device. After a US decision to place components of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia declared its withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. China has demonstrated its space war capabilities by shooting down one of its own weather satellites.

    These developments are worrying and somewhat paradoxical. At a time when there are no longer any ideological differences between the main powers, when the economic and political interdependence between states and regions reaches new heights, and when the revolution in information technology brings the world into the living rooms of billions of people, we ought to be able to agree on steps to restrain our capacity for war and destruction.

    So, where do we go from here?

    There is some movement indicating that key actors may be moving back to multilateral approaches and diplomacy. The failure and vast human cost of the military adventures in Iraq and Lebanon may have demonstrated the limitations of military strategies to achieve foreign policy objectives. The shift in strategy towards North Korea in negotiations over its nuclear program and the resumption of the six-party talks is encouraging. Waving a big stick may be counterproductive. An alternative path, containing suitable carrots, needs to be offered. It remains to be seen if this approach will be taken also in the case of Iran.

    For the past few years, I have chaired the independent international Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, with 14 experts from different parts of the world. In June 2006, I presented our report, Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear Biological and Chemical Arms. We made 60 recommendations on how to revive disarmament and restore the confidence in the international disarmament and non-proliferation regime.

    The commission urged all states to return to the fundamental undertakings made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty is based on a double bargain: the non-nuclear weapons states committed themselves not to develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapon states committed themselves to negotiate towards disarmament.

    So long as the nuclear weapon states maintain that they need nuclear weapons for their national security, why shouldn’t others? The commission concluded that one of the most important ways to curb weapons’ proliferation is working to avoid states feeling a need to obtain nuclear weapons.

    The co-operative approach needs to be complemented by the enforcement of the test-ban treaty, a cut-off treaty on the production of fissile material for weapons, and effective safeguards and international verification to prevent states as well as non-state actors from acquiring nuclear weapons.

    I hope the window of opportunity is not yet shut. There may still be time to wake up and turn back to co-operative solutions to contemporary security challenges.

    The new generation of political leaders has an unprecedented opportunity to achieve peace through co-operation. We do not have the threat of war between the military powers hanging over our heads. Admittedly, there are flashpoints that need to be dealt with constructively — such as Kashmir, the Middle East, Taiwan and so on. But the numbers of armed conflicts and victims of armed conflicts have decreased. Never before have nations been so interdependent and never before have peoples of the world cared so much for the wellbeing of each other. Prospects are great for a functioning world organization devoted to establishing peace, promoting respect for universal human rights and securing our environment for future generations.

    If all can agree that we need international co-operation and multilateral solutions to protect the earth against climate change and the destruction of our environment, to keep the world economy in balance and moving, and to prevent terrorism and organized crime, then should it be so difficult to conclude that we also need to co-operate to stop shooting at each other?

     

    Dr Hans Blix is president of the World Federation of United Nations Association and was director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997.

  • Preventable Genocide: Who Speaks for Humanity

    It’s wonderful to be in Santa Barbara and to see such a good crowd – especially given the fact that it is beautiful Saturday morning in sunny California and genocide is the subject of our discussion. It is clear that I have strayed from my California roots and been on the East Coast too long, as I am reminded of a cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker magazine, with the text, “Would you like to grab a drink after the Genocide panel?” How indeed, do we incorporate something like genocide into our “normal” lives?

    In the aftermath of the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin coined the word ‘genocide’. Lemkin, a lawyer and Holocaust survivor wanted to find a way to describe the policies that were intended to exterminate Jews throughout Europe in order to prevent such a thing from happening again. Based on his efforts, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and went into force three years later. The Convention defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and it made genocide a punishable crime under international law.

    Institutionalization of Hope

    The United Nations was itself created from the ashes of World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust in order to prevent the extraordinary human suffering witnessed at that time. From the beginning, the United Nations has spoken to the ideals of people around the world for a better and more secure future – it was what former President Clinton recently called the institutionalization of hope,” based on three ideals: the maintenance of international peace and security, the promotion of economic development, and the protection of human rights. As envisioned from the beginning of the Organization, governments could take action under the United Nations Charter to prevent genocide. The United Nations second Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold said the United Nations’spare job was not to take us to Heaven but to keep us from Hell. Genocide is the ultimate Hell.

    But we have not always lived up to the promise, sometimes succumbing to divisive international politics; the lack of collective political will to confront evil; and a callous tendency to preference sovereign rights of nations over the rights of vulnerable individuals in those nations. While the United Nations helped ultimately bring peace to Cambodia in the 1990s, it did so only after more than a million people died at the hands of the pathological Khmer Rouge regime. Alongside all countries of the world and all other international institutions, the United Nations failed to stop the mass murder of 800,000 in Rwanda in 1994. And again it failed, we all failed, to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the mid-90s.

    In short, history demonstrates that the United Nations faces a fundamental dilemma: on the one hand it represents both the highest ideals of humanity and the “institutionalization of hope,” but at the same time, its high ambitions have often contrasted sharply with the realities of what national governments have been able to agree on and deliver.

    While the United Nations may be imperfect, it is also indispensable. As the only universal body representing and bringing together every country and region of the world, the United Nations enjoys a unique legitimacy.

    So the United Nations is being asked to do more and more things: a quadrupling of United Nations peacekeeping forces in the last decade, so that at this moment, with over 93,000 sets of “boots on the ground” in 18 hot-spots in every corner of the globe, the United Nations is second only to the US in terms of the number of troops deployed around the world. The United Nations has also been relied on for providing humanitarian assistance in complex emergencies, such as in Southeast Asia after the tsunami and in Darfur, so that now there are more humanitarian missions run by the United Nations than ever before, serving the needs of over 40 million people around the world each year in almost 40 countries. The United Nations has also become the pre-eminent provider of organizing and monitoring national elections. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are a blueprint that have been agreed to by all the world’s countries to meet the needs of the poor, including halving extreme poverty and curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

    Responsibility to Protect

    But what about preventing genocide?

    Is the United Nations’role limited to providing the normative and legal framework for combating genocide embodied in the Convention? Or can the United Nations become the pre-eminent service provider in this area, as it has in peackekeeping, humanitarian, elections, and providing a framework for development? The United Nations is not a world government, and it does not have its own military to send in to prevent or stop genocide. Ultimately, the decision to intervene and deliver troops and equipment is up to the governments of the countries that make up the United Nations, and more specifically, the Security Council.
    But the United Nations’s role is extremely important in getting governments to make that calculation. The Secretary-General has a moral voice to draw attention to humanitarian crises and he has done that tirelessly on Darfur.

    And in September 2005 at the United Nations, the largest gathering of heads of state ever assembled took another huge step. They approved, by consensus, the principle of the “Responsibility to Protect” – the idea that every government has a responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, but when they are unable or unwilling to do so, the community of nations is be prepared to take collective action. In terms of international norms and law, this was a fundamental shift. Governments have always been able to hide behind sovereignty, by saying that they have a right to determine what goes on behind their own borders. Now, governments as large as China and as small as Burundi have acknowledged that they have a responsibility to their civilians and that failure to do so means that the international community has the responsibility and can take action, either through diplomatic, humanitarian, or other means, including military means (under Chapter VII) of the United Nations Charter.

    Such a historic agreement is possible only through the United Nations. Those who criticize the United Nations, arguing instead for coalitions of the willing or alliances of democracies to replace it, have failed to realize that an agreement on how to address genocide by angels alone, leaves most of humanity at the mercy of those less angelically inclined. But through the United Nations we now have an agreed principle for protecting all of the world’s people.

    However, despite its adoption last year, the Responsibility to Protect has not yet been operationalized. Turning it from a principle into an actionable norm is essential. Civil society and NGOs can help by influencing policy makers in governments and insisting that they put into action the Responsibility to Protect.
    Three different types of United Nations institutions can play on enhanced role in the fight against genocide:

    First, the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide

    In 2004, the Secretary-General appointed Mr. Juan Méndez, Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide based on the lessons learned from past instances of collective failure to address gross human rights violations. The Special Advisor acts as an early warning mechanism to bring attention to situations that could result in genocide and advises the Secretary-General and the Security Council. This is the first time the United Nations has had a position that is devoted exclusively to preventing genocide and mass abuses of human rights, and he has been active on Darfur, traveling to the region and reporting back on how to prevent the situation from deteriorating further.

    Second, the new Human Rights Council

    Another recent development that can significantly bolster human rights at the United Nations is the establishment of the Human Rights Council to replace the Commission on Human Rights. The world needs an intergovernmental body which effectively deals with human rights. The Human Rights Council is a crucial opportunity and holds great promise despite some early stumbles that make it appear to be replicating some of the failures of the Commission. It meets year around and has a new feature – the universal peer review that ensures that all members, including the most powerful countries, who sit in judgment of human rights situations around the world, have their own human rights records scrutinized. The Council is an important development but it has to be supported and made to work.
    Third, the International Criminal Court , war crimes tribunals, and “hybrid” courts

    Within the last 10 years, we have seen ICC investigations on Sudan and Uganda have dramatically changed the political equation there. remarkable progress in international justice – the establishment of the International Criminal Court, the tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which have tried the first genocide cases against top officials, and the hybrid national/international courts in Sierra Leone and Cambodia. But questions have been raised about whether pursuing justice may undermine peace. In cases like Uganda, where the suffering has gone on for two decades, some say that we should not disrupt such hard won peace talks by trying the perpetrators. But peace without justice for the victims is not sustainable or wise.

    Darfur as a test case

    So we have witnessed progress in key areas. But can we prevent genocide?

    The singular biggest test we face is that in Darfur, Sudan.

    The situation on the ground is stark. Since the conflict began in 2003, more than 200,000 people have been killed from fighting, famine, or disease, and over 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes. As a reminder, just 6 days ago large scale militia attacks in West Darfur on 8 settlements caused scores of civilian deaths, including 27 children under the age of 12.

    With the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement in May we had a framework for ending the violence and a road map for moving to stability, but not all parties have accepted the Agreement. The Security Council adopted a resolution to send in United Nations peacekeeping troops. This has been rejected by the Sudanese government. We therefore need smart pressure and a global diplomatic campaign. In the meantime, the African Union has done a tremendous job, but it needs to be strengthened. The UN has committed to providing support for the AU mission in Sudan, and we are looking at bolstering that support, but again, contributions depend on Member States.

    Now we have to alter the calculation of potential perpetrators of abuses, and equally importantly, make it much more difficult for governments which decide not to act to prevent genocide.

    The Responsibility to Protect must be put into practice. The role of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide could be strengthened. The Human Rights Council, should adopt a country-specific resolution on Darfur as recommended by the Secretary-General that urges the government of Sudan to allow United Nations peacekeepers into Darfur.

    Achieving a lasting peace in Darfur also means bringing those responsible to justice. The Security Council has referred Darfur to the International Criminal Court. The case against the perpetrators is being built as we speak. Action by the International Criminal Court must be supported and seen through.

    Conclusion

    In order to prevent genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, we still face tremendous challenges. But nothing is inevitable. Genocide is indeed preventable. 60 years ago, we didn’t even have a name for this evil. Now, we not only can name it, we have legal mechanisms obligating all to act to stop it, and increasing experience at trying to stop it. We now have the knowledge, we have the United Nations institution to help organize our response, and the political, economic, and military tools to prevent it. The question is, “Will we use them?”

    Let us work together to do so. Santa Barbara may feel as far from Darfur as a place can be – indeed it is. And yet, you all turned up today to engage on this most difficult of subjects. A crucial first step. Now organize, let your representatives know how you feel. The United States as a country must show leadership. Support United Nations efforts. Place pressure on all national governments to fulfill their obligations. Support the NGOs whose dedicated staff are risking their lives on the front lines.

    Today’s topic was “Who speaks for humanity?” One of my favorite saying is by Pastor Martin Niemöller, a German citizen of conscience who reflected on his experience with genocide in his own country 60 years ago:

    First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.

    So to the question posed today, “Who speaks for Humanity?”, the answer is clear – we do. We must.

    Robert Orr is Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The speech was given at a United Nations Day event held in Santa Barbara, California on November 4, 2006.
  • The Modern Successor to the Slave Trade

    For many years, I’ve been involved in the peace business, doing what I can to help people overcome their differences. In doing so, I’ve also learnt a lot about the business of war: the arms trade. In my opinion it is the modern slave trade. It is an industry out of control: every day more than 1,000 people are killed by conventional weapons. The vast majority of those people are innocent men, women and children.

    There have been international treaties to control the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons for decades. Yet, despite the mounting death toll, there is still no treaty governing sales of all conventional weapons from handguns to attack helicopters. As a result, weapons fall into the wrong hands all too easily, fuelling human rights abuses, prolonging wars and digging countries deeper into poverty.

    This is allowed to continue because of the complicity of governments, especially rich countries’ governments, which turn a blind eye to the appalling human suffering associated with the proliferation of weapons.

    Every year, small arms alone kill more people than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. Many more people are injured, terrorised or driven from their homes by armed violence. Even as you read this, one of these human tragedies is unfolding somewhere on the planet.

    Take the Democratic Republic of Congo, where armed violence recently flared up again, and millions have died during almost a decade of conflict. Despite a UN arms embargo against armed groups in the country, weapons have continued to flood in from all over the world.

    Arms found during weapons collections include those made in Germany, France, Israel, USA and Russia. The only common denominator is that nearly all these weapons were manufactured outside Africa. Five rich countries manufacture the vast majority of the world’s weapons. In 2005, Russia, the United States, France, Germany and the UK accounted for an estimated 82 per cent of the global arms market. And it’s big business: the amount rich countries spend on fighting HIV/Aids every year represents just 18 days’ global spending on arms.

    But while the profits flow back to the developed world, the effects of the arms trade are predominantly felt in developing countries. More than two-thirds of the value of all arms are sold to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

    In addition to the deaths, injuries and rapes perpetrated with these weapons, the cost of conflict goes deeper still, destroying health and education systems.

    For example, in northern Uganda, which has been devastated by 20 years of armed conflict, it has been estimated that 250,000 children do not attend school. The war in northern Uganda, which may be finally coming to an end, has been fuelled by supplies of foreign-made weapons. And, as with so many wars, the heaviest toll has been on the region’s children. Children under five are always the most vulnerable to disease, and in a war zone adequate medical care is often not available.

    The world could eradicate poverty in a few generations were only a fraction of the expenditure on the war business to be spent on peace. An average of $22bn is spent on arms by countries in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa every year, according to estimates for the US Congress. This sum would have enabled those countries to put every child in school and to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015, fulfilling two of the Millennium Development Goals.

    This year, the world has the chance to finally say no to the continuing scandal of the unregulated weapons trade. In October, governments will vote on a resolution at the UN General Assembly to start working towards an Arms Trade Treaty. That Treaty would be based on a simple principle: no weapons for violations of international law. In other words, a ban on selling weapons if there is a clear risk they will be used to abuse human rights or fuel conflict. The UN resolution has been put forward by the governments of Australia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Kenya, and the UK. These governments believe the idea of an Arms Trade Treaty is one whose time has come.

    I agree. We must end impunity for governments who authorise the supply of weapons when they know there’s a great danger those weapons will be used for gross human rights abuses. Great strides are being made towards ending impunity for war criminals. It cannot be acceptable that their arms suppliers continue to escape punishment. No longer should the peace business be undermined by the arms business. I call on all governments to put the control of the international arms trade at the top of their agenda.

  • Assessing the United Nations After the Lebanon War of 2006

    Of course, we all breathe a bit easier with the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon even if its prospects for stemming the violence altogether are not favorable at this time. And after dithering for 34 days while the bombs dropped and the rockets flew we need to acknowledge that the United Nations, for all of its weaknesses, plays indispensable roles in a wide array of international conflict situations. It is notable in this instance that despite Israel’s discomfort with UN authority, and the reluctance of the United States to accept any UN interference with its foreign policy priorities, as in Iraq, both countries were forced to turn to the UN when Israel’s war against Lebanon ran up against the unexpectedly strong Hezbollah resistance. At the same time this is certainly not a moment to celebrate the UN for fulfilling its intended role as dedicated to war-prevention and the defense of states victimized by aggression. Perhaps, it is an occasion to take stock of what to expect from the UN in the early part of the twenty-first century, concluding that the Organization can be regarded neither as a failure nor as a success, but something inbetween that is complicated and puzzling.

    After World War II a mood of relief that the war was over was mingled with satisfaction (that the German and Italian fascism and Japanese militarism were defeated) and worry (that a future major war might well be fought with nuclear weapons, and even if not, that military technology was making wars more and more devastating for civilian society). One hopeful response was the establishment of the United Nations on the basis of a core agreement that recourse to force by a state, except in cases of strict self-defense was unconditionally prohibited. This norm was supposed to be supplemented by machinery for collective security intended to protect victims of aggression, but this undertaking although written into the UN Charter has never been implemented.

    The victorious countries in World War II plus China were designated as Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and given the right to veto any decision. The intention here was to acknowledge that the UN could not hope to ensure compliance with international law by these dominant states, and to avoid raising expectations too high it was better to acknowledge this deference of ‘law’ to ‘power’ restricted the role of the UN. But what was not anticipated in 1945, and has now again damaged the reputation of the UN, was the realization that the Organization could serve as an instrument for geopolitics in such a way as to override the most basic restraints on war making built into the UN Charter, but this is exactly what happened in the context of Israel’s war on Lebanon.

    The UNSC stood by in silence in the face of Israel’s decision to use the pretext of the July 12th border incitement by Hezbollah, involving only a small number of Israeli military personnel, to launch all out war on an essentially defenseless Lebanon. A month of mercilesxs Israeli air attacks on Lebanese villages and cities has taken place, while the UN refused even to demand an immediate and total ceasefire to the obvious dismay of the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. And even this benchmark is indicative of just how low expectations have fallen with respect to UNSC action when there exists any serious friction between the UN Charter and the policy priorities of the United States as the controlling member of the Organization. It should be recalled that it was the US Government that declared the UN ‘irrelevant’ in 2003 when the Security Council at least stood firm, and refused to authorize an unlawful invasion of Iraq. With Iraq, too, the experience, more than anything else, underscored the fallen expectations associated with the UNSC. It was then applauded for not mandating aggression against Iraq, but when the invasion went ahead anyway in March 2003, the UNSC was complicit with aggression by way of silence, and went even further later on, acting as a junior partner in the American-led occupation of Iraq. The point being stressed is that the UN is unable to prevent its Permanent Members from violating the Charter, but worse, it collaborates with such violations in support of its most powerful member. The UN has become in these situations, sadly, more of a geopolitical instrument than an instrument for the enforcement of international law. This regression betrays the vision that guided the architects of the UN back in 1945, chief among whom were American diplomats.

    It should be also recalled that when German and Japanese surviving leaders were criminally punished after World War II for waging aggressive war at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials the prosecutors promised that the principles of law applied to judge the defendants associated with the defeated countries would in the future we applicable to assess the behavior of the victorious power then sitting in judgment. This Nuremberg Promise has been long since forgotten by governments, but it should not be ignored by public opinion and citizens of conscience everywhere.

    Nothing illustrates this fallen condition of the UN better than the one-sided UNSC Res. 1701 ceasefire resolution finally approved by unanimous vote on Aug. 11th. This resolution, although in some respects a compromise that reflects the inconclusive battlefield outcome, is tilted in many of its particulars to favor the country that both wrongfully escalated the border incident and carried out massive combat operations against civilian targets in flagrant violation of the law of war: Res. 1701 blames Hezbollah for starting the conflict; it refrains from making any critical comment on Israeli bombing and artillery campaign directed at the entire country of Lebanon; it imposes an obligation to disarm Hezbollah without placing any restrictions on Israeli military capabilities or policies; it places peacekeeping forces only on Lebanese territory, and is vague about requiring the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces; it still fails to censure Israel for expanding the scope of its ground presence in Lebanon by 300% to beat the ceasefire deadline, and it calls for the prohibition of ‘all’ attacks by Hezbollah while requiring Israel only to stop ‘offensive military operations,’ leaving the definition of what is offensive in the hands of policymakers in Tel Aviv and Washington.

    We learn some important things about the United Nations from this experience. First, it is incapable of protecting any state, whatever the circumstances, that is the victim of an aggressive war initiated by the United States or its close allies. This incapacity extends even to proposing resolutions of censure. Secondly, the UNSC, while not actually supporting such claims of aggressive war, will collaborate with the aggressor in the post-conflict situation to ratify the effects of the aggression. This combination means effectively that the Charter prohibition directed at non-defensive wars applies only to enemies of the United States. Any legal order that achieves respect treats equals equally. The UN is guilty of treating equals unequally, and thus constantly undermines its own authority.

    There is another disturbing element that concerns the manner in which states aligned with the United States are using force against non-state actors. Such states, of which Israel is a leading example, engage in what a law commentator, Ali Khan, has called ‘punitive self-defense.’ UN Charter Article 51 deliberately tried to restrict this option to claim self-defense by requiring ‘a prior armed attack,’ which was definitely understood, as being of a much more sustained and severe initiation of violent conflict than an incident of violence due to an isolated attack or a border skirmish. More concretely, the events on the borders of Gaza and Lebanon that gave rise to sustained Israeli war making did not give Israel the legal right to act in self-defense, although it did authorize Israel to defend itself by retaliating in a proportionate manner. This distinction is crucial to the Charter conception of legitimate uses of international force.

    What punitive self-defense means is a deliberate policy of over-reaction such that there is created a gross disproportion between the violence inflicted by the non-state actor, in the Lebanese instance, Hezbollah, and the response of the state actor Israel. It also means, contrary to the UN Charter and international law, that every violent provocation by a non-state actor can be treated as an occasion for claiming a right to wage a full war based on ‘self-defense.’ This punitive approach to non-state adversaries completely negates a cardinal principle of both international law and the just war tradition by validating disproportionate uses of retaliatory force.

    This discouraging interpretation of what to expect from the United Nations in war/peace situations should not lead to a cynical dismissal of the Organization. We need the UN to step in, as in Lebanon, when the arbiters of geopolitics give the signal, and help with the post-conflict process of recovery and reconstruction. But we should be under no illusions that this role adequately carries out the vision of the UN contained in its own Charter or upholds the most basic norms of international law.

    How can this situation be improved? There are three areas of effort that are worthy of attention:

    –perhaps, most important, is the recognition by major states that war is almost always a dysfunctional means of pursuing their security interests, especially with respecte to addressing challenges posed by non-state actors; in this regard, odd as it may seem, adherence to the limits imposed by international law may serve national interests better than relying on military superiority to override the restrictions on force associated with the UN Charter; note that the United States would have avoided the worst foreign policy disasters in its history if it had not ignored these restrictions in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War; in their essence, limiting war to true instances of self-defense is a practical restriction on state sovereignty agreed upon by experienced political leaders;

    –of secondary importance is for the members of the United Nations to take more seriously their own obligations to uphold the Charter; it may be appropriate in this spirit to revive attention to the so-called Uniting for Peace Resolution 337A that confers a residual responsibility on the General Assembly to act when the Security Council fails to do so; this 1950 resolution was drafted in the setting of the cold war, with an intention to circumvent a Soviet veto, but its use was suspended by the West in the wake of decolonization, which was perceived as making the General Assembly less supportive of Western interests than had been the case in the early years of the UN; in present circumstances, the General Assembly could be reempowered to supplement the efforts of the Security Council where an urgent crisis involving peace and security is not being addressed in a manner consistent with the UN Charter; along similar lines, would be an increased reliance on seeking legal guidance from the International Court of Justice when issues of the sort raised by the Israeli escalation occurred;

    –and finally, given these disappointments associated with the preeminence of geopolitics within the UN, it is important for individuals and citizen organizations to act with vigilance. The World Tribunal on Iraq, taking place in Istanbul in June 2005, passed ‘legal’ judgment on the Iraq War and those responsible for its initiation and conduct. It made the sort of legal case that the UN was unable to make because of geopolitical considerations. It provided a comprehensive examination of the policies and their effects, and issues a judgment with recommendations drafted by a jury of conscience presided over by the renowned Indian writer and activist, Arundhati Roy. Such pronouncements by representatives of civil society cannot obviously stop the Iraq War, but they do have two positive effects: first, they provide media and public with a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of international law and the UN Charter to a controversial ongoing war; secondly, by doing so, they highlight the shortcomings of official institutions, including the United Nations in protecting the wellbeing of the peoples of the world.

    Richard Falk is chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation board and Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara

  • Humanity’s Future: Creating a Global Republic of Conscience and Creativity

    All my life, I have felt connected to the stars. As a boy, I walked at night in the garden of my grandfather King’s house, looking up at the dazzling lights in the sky. One world was not enough for me. I wrote stories about the explorations of the stars that I knew human beings would undertake. My tales landed me in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in a book entitled Pioneers of Wonder.

    As I went through my long life I encountered one glorious being after another. I began to become aware of the tremendous role played by humanity in the development of the amazing planet called the Earth.

    I became aware of the spiritual wisdom of the saints and prophets; the writers of the Gospels and the soaring poets, ranging from Rumi to Shakespeare; the creators of great music, ranging from the singers of songs in all languages to the deep composers, Bach and Puccini and Beethoven, realizing that there were no limits to the creations pouring forth from the human soul. I found everlasting pleasure in the lines of William Blake—The one “who kisses joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

    I have just put together a book, which encompasses my life’s experiences with the many kinds of writing I have composed—beginning with my imaginary trips to the far stars and the pains of hunger endured with many people in the dark days of the 1930s. When I went to the University of Kansas City, my professors encouraged me to shift from science fiction to the practice of journalism.

    My last story for an interstellar magazine was called “Star Ship Invincible.” It described what happened to a group of people who attempted to travel from Earth to Jupiter in a new vessel built to be strong enough to pass through any pressures brought against it. But that ship was not invincible after all. It fell into a Black Hole, a void in space that could not be passed through.

    The ship was absorbed into another universe from which it could not escape. The attempts of human beings to go into other dimensions were not achievable. They could not tell what had happened to them. They had traveled beyond their finite limits.

    My next experience was to write a story about a man caught in the tortures of hunger—whose only solace came from a recording of human laughter. In a day of desperation he tried to sell that recording to an old pawnbroker, but the old man did not find it worth more than a few dollars. The old man was wounded by the anguish in that roar of laughter. “Shut it off,” the broker said. “Please shut it off.”

    The young man went back into the freezing night from which he had come. The old man was alone with the echoes of that defiant mirth in his shop filled with the precious things sold to him by people who were dying of thirst and hunger. That was the state of the world for many people in those years of pain and poverty.

    That story was broadcast on the NBC radio network and reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, edited by Edward O’Brien in England. It caught the attention of editors on the Kansas City Star, and I was hired by that paper as a reporter although I had never taken a course in journalism. The managing editor, C. G. Wellington, said he was reluctant to take me on—because I reminded him of Ernest Hemingway, a writer he had employed there in 1917. Wellington said Hemingway had promised him to make a lifetime career on the Star—and then had run off to be an ambulance drive in World War I.

    Hemingway came to Kansas City soon after the publication of his great book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the Civil War in Spain when General Franco overthrew the Spanish Republic and created a dictatorship there. Hemingway visited the Star on a night when Wellington was not there—and I had a chance to show him some of my stories. “You’ve got good stuff, kid,” Hemingway said. “But if you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to get out of Kansas City. The world is changing fast, kid. You have to go places.”

    I followed his advice and went to New York in January 1941. I landed a job on the Associated Press staff in Rockefeller Center, and dealt with news pouring in from all parts of the planet. Then I was appointed to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. In January 1943, I was drafted into the United States Army and became a war correspondent.

    I landed in Normandy in 1944 and rode with General George Patton’s Third Army across France and into Paris. The liberation of Paris on a golden day in August was one of the most exhilarating joys of my life. The Nazi forces which had occupied that beautiful city in 1940 retreated from our troops in disarray. As they retreated, they were fired upon by the Free French under the command of General Charles de Gaulle.

    We were aware of the fact that Adolf Hitler, the Nazis’ leader, had ordered the German general in command of Paris to set fire to the city. But he had refused to do so. Hitler kept asking: “Is Paris burning?” but no answer was given to him. The innate humanity of a German officer was more powerful than Hitlerism.

    I was one of the American soldiers who were received with hugs and kisses when we entered the city. I appreciated the warm welcome given to us by the French people, particularly the French girls.

    We rushed into the bars, followed by the girls. While we drank bottles of champagne, we rejected the offers of the girls for unlimited sexual services. When I shouted: “I’m a married man!” the girls murmured: “When the war’s over, you can go back to your wife, but you’re over here now. You ought to be grateful for what we can give you now.” I didn’t take advantage of the offers. I wanted to survive—and get back to my wife in New York with a good body. On our honeymoon, she had given me everything a woman could give to a man, and I hoped we would have many years of such enjoyments.

    When the Nazis surrendered, I flew home. I had received a Certificate of Distinguished Service from Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, one of Gen. Eisenhower’s deputy commanders, and I returned to the AP with a sense of recognition that I had given three years of my life to the struggle against Nazism. Many of my friends had been wounded or killed—and I had interviewed many wounded men as a War Correspondent. Yet, I had not been crippled or injured. I thanked the Lord of the Universe for the blessings he had given me, but I had not received the punishment I expected.

    The AP did not give me the raise in salary I expected. Barbara and I celebrated my return by deep lovemaking and we had produced a wonderful child, a boy we named Terence Francis Kelly. The cost of living was rising and so I moved from the AP to the National Housing Agency, where I served as an information specialist and earned a much larger salary. During the war a housing shortage had developed, and President Truman had launched a large-scale building program designed to meet the needs of millions of veterans and others whose lives had been disrupted by the war.

    I liked the Housing Agency and I knew that its work was important. But I could not resist a tempting offer from a public relations agency, the Fitzgerald Company, which had been founded by a friend of mine. I left that agency to become a consultant to the National Book Publishers Council and then to serve as the U.S. director of the Study of World News conducted by the International Press Institute, which had received a large grant from the Ford Foundation.

    Before I joined the Study of World News, I served as the Washington director of Averell Harriman’s 1952 campaign to become the Democratic candidate for president. Harriman had the kind of experience that I thought a president should have. He had been the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the director of Truman’s Security Agency, and one of the administrators of the Marshall Plan, which had revived Europe after the war. I went with him across the United States in a chartered plane, and wrote speeches for him indicating that he was dedicated to the liberal program on which Truman had won his victory in 1948. But the nomination went to Adlai Stevenson, who had been elected governor of Illinois that year.

    Stevenson offered me a place on his staff, but I was eager to get out of politics and I became vice president of the Fitzgerald agency again. Then I leaped over to take part in the Study of World News, which had been started by the Ford Foundation under the leadership of Lester Markel, Sunday editor of the NY Times.

    The study got under way in September of 1952, when staffs were organized in Zurich, Switzerland; New York; and Madras, India. W. MacNeil Lowry, formerly chief Washington correspondent for the Cox newspapers, was given operating responsibility for the entire project. Lowry asked me to take charge of the work in the United States.

    Arrangements were made with a group of ten leading researchers in American journalism schools, headed by Dr. Ralph Casey of the University of Minnesota, to measure the amounts of foreign news printed in American papers. The news flowing on agency wires from all over the world was surveyed by the IPI staff in New York. The wire reports of all the major news agencies were made available by the agencies for study during the same weeks.

    Ninety-three of the American papers were put on the list through a statistical sampling method used by Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Institute for Journalistic Studies at Stanford University. The list gave fair representation to morning and evening papers, papers in different regions of the countries, papers representing a cross-section of American journalism.

    For purposes of comparison with this list, a separate list of large papers was prepared. Papers in Europe and India were selected by the IPI staff in consultation with editors involved. Forty-eight papers in Western Europe and 28 in India were chosen for examination. The communist papers in the Soviet bloc and in China were not included however. It was assumed that these papers were instruments of government propaganda.

    When all the phases of the IPI studies were completed in the spring of 1953, the IPI had the largest assemblage of facts and ideas about the handling of news around the world. The reports eventually released by the IPI showed the gaps and discrepancies in the handling of such information—and created enduring controversies about the prejudices shown by editors who favored certain countries and disfavored others.

    Lester Markel had declared in 1952 that “the main objective of the Institute is to bring out greater world understanding through a better flow of information.” My participation in this vast project led me to believe that the task was almost impossible.

    In my 92 years on this planet, I have been a professor of communication and disseminator of information to illuminate the tremendous tasks of the human species. I have been appalled by the human capacity for evil and uplifted by the enormous capacity for good.

    We are evolutionary giants with origins linked to the cosmic explosion that brought the universe into being. We are composed of whirling atoms and glowing molecules beyond our comprehension. Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of the 20th Century, who brought us into the nuclear age, which may destroy us all, decided that we were created by a Spirit we could never understand. We can never understand how far we have come and how far we may have to go.

    We are electromagnetic fields of energy and yet many of us may become Glorious Beings rising like mountains on new horizons. As the poet William Blake said, we can kiss joy as it flies and live in eternity’s sunrise. We can respond to the never-ending allurements we were born to enjoy.

    I have come here tonight to talk about humanity’s future and to hear your views on what the future may hold for us. When I was a young writer of science fiction, I walked in darkness, fearing the terrible disasters that might lie ahead of us. Yet, I went from one great experience to another.

    My mother gave me the name of King. That was her maiden name—Martha King—and she wanted me to have it. She married a man named Kelly, who sacrificed much of his manhood on a battlefield in France, and she did not want me to be completely identified with an Irish name and Irish history. So I have gone through life with a resounding name—Frank King Kelly. When I am down, overwhelmed by the awful things I have endured, I shout my name out loud: “Frank King Kelly!” and I feel related to all the Kings and Kellys in the amazing history of humankind!

    How was it possible for me as a boy to endure the blows of bullies in my first years in school? Why was I given a scholarship at the U. of Kansas City? How did one of my stories get into a collection of Best American Short Stories when I was 21? How did I get the advice I needed from a great writer, Ernest Hemmingway, who urged me to get out into the world and overcome my fears?

    When I went to New York, I couldn’t sell enough stories to survive there, even though I got some unexpected income by writing about the frustrated lives of girls in New York and Washington. I was given a chance to write these “true stories” for a magazine edited by a man who was a friend of one of my professors in Kansas City. He persuaded me to put more “zing” in those stories—and I made enough money to live well in New York until I got a good job on the AP staff. One of my stories was featured in a volume of these “true romances,” and I wrote about them in an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Synthetic Sin.”

    In Manhattan I became a special correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other papers across the country. I wrote an article about the successful campaign against prejudice being conducted by a state commission against discrimination, which had been fighting against racial, religious, and national group prejudices for 2 ½ years. Commission Chairman Charles Garside disclosed that the AFL Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, and Express and Station Employees had repealed regulations that had restricted Negroes. The union had also eliminated from its constitution all the provisions that restricted membership to White persons.

    I was happy to write about such actions because I hated the treatment then given to Blacks, immigrants, and other minorities in American society. When I was a reporter on the Kansas City Star, I rode ambulances from the General Hospital to the scenes of fires, murders, and accidents. When we saw Black people in any of those painful situations, the ambulance went speeding by. The ambulance drivers told me: “We don’t stop for Blacks. They’ve got their own hospitals and their own ambulances.” I was horrified by the separation of human beings in the city where I had been born.

    I tried to get the city editor of the Star to let me do a series of articles on the brutality I had seen at the city jail, where police officers routinely beat homeless men who were arrested for wandering in the streets. “We can’t get the cops down on us,” he said. “We need their help in many places.” I saw the corruption in the police force and other agencies, but I quickly gave up my efforts to expose what needed to be done. I found out that I wasn’t a crusader.

    When I was offered a job as a researcher and speech writer for President Truman, I knew he had been elected with the backing of a notorious political machine—the Pendergast organization, run by Boss Tom Pendergast. My liberal friends urged me to keep away from that organization. “If you work for Truman, you’ll be regarded as a crook or subnormal mentally,” one of these friends said.

    But I had been told by reporters who investigated Truman that he was not personally involved in any of Pendergast’s chicanery. Pendergast had endorsed Truman because he was widely admired for his personal integrity. My wife and my literary agent, Mary Abbot, were convinced that Truman was a fine man. They admired the work he had done in trying to eliminate overcharging by the corporations, which had made huge profits in World War II.

    When I got a call from the White House in the spring of 1948, asking me to do research and writing for Truman in the Presidential campaign that year, I was reluctant to take it seriously. I didn’t know anyone on his staff. I was astonished when I learned that Kenneth Birkhead, one of my friends who had been a student with me at the University of Kansas City, had recommended me. He had told Clark Clifford and Bill Batt, the two men who were organizing Truman’s “whistle stop” train trips, that I was a fast writer who had written articles for many newspapers and I shared Truman’s ideas about giving full rights to people of all colors and creeds.

    So I went to Washington, helped to draft the Democratic platform, wrote drafts of many of the speeches Truman delivered from the backend of his campaign train, and shared in Truman’s unexpected triumph at the polls.

    I hadn’t sought any appointment on Truman’s White House staff. I was prepared to go back to the Fitzgerald agency, but my friends at the Atlantic Monthly had persuaded the president of Boston University to offer me an appointment as a professor of communications there. The Atlantic press had just published my first serious novel—a book entitled An Edge of Light, about my role as an AP editor in New York—and they said that a professorship at Boston University would give me a stable income and enough free time to write books.

    On the night in November when Truman’s so shocking triumph set off celebrations by delighted Democrats in Washington and other cities, Barbara and I drank champagne together and packed our few belongings into suitcases and prepared to move to a house in a Boston suburb. We didn’t realize that we would spend only a few months in Boston. When I arrived at the university, a secretary told me: “A Senator with a fancy name has been calling you from Washington. I’ve put a note on your desk.”

    The Senator was Scott Lucas of Illinois. He told me that he was scheduled to be the Majority Leader of the Senate, succeeding Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who had been elected Vice President on the Truman ticket. He said he needed a speech written and asked me to join his staff in January of 1949.

    The president of Boston University was negative toward the idea when I talked to him about it. “You want to run back to Washington when you’ve just been appointed here as an associate professor?” Daniel Marsh said, angrily. “I won’t give you a leave of absence for any such purpose.”

    My friends at the Atlantic Monthly were negative also, and urged me to stay in Boston. Members of the White House staff said, however, that Lucas would be a key factor in getting Truman’s proposals enacted by a Senate largely controlled by conservative Southern Democrats.

    I stayed four months on the faculty in Boston, and I found my students responsive to my arguments for the kind of progressive agenda offered by Truman. Truman had strongly supported the formation of the United Nations; he had desegregated the American armed forces; he had favored an expansion of the social security system and a national health program. In his inaugural address in January 1949, he had declared that every human being had a right to “a decent, satisfying life.” He offered encouragement to the rising movement for women’s attainment to the highest positions in every field.

    I found that the students I had in my classes at Boston University—most of them war veterans—backed the creation of international laws to bring principles of justice into the world community. They admired Truman’s willingness to confront critics and reactionary opponents. I finally returned to Washington to work for the Senate leader and to participate in struggles against McCarthyism, the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and other bigots.

    I had lived through the oppressive years when one-third of the people had lived in poverty and despair while the federal government under President Hoover had been virtually paralyzed. I favored a new democracy with places for everybody.

    But Senator Lucas was defeated when he ran for re-election—beaten by a man named Everett Dirksen, whose nickname was “the Wizard of Ooze.” The American Medical Association sponsored pamphlets denouncing Truman’s health plan and many doctors took part in the opposition to Lucas because he had supported that plan.

    After Lucas was rejected by the voters, I stayed on for two years with his successor as the Senate Leader, Ernest McFarland of Arizona. McFarland was a good-hearted man, but he was not a very progressive legislator. I left my job as the staff director of the Senate Majority Policy Committee, and plunged into other activities.

    I helped the American Book Publishers Council repel attempts by right-wing groups to censor books, and I served as the U.S. director of an International Press Institute study of international news. That study revealed that many American newspapers carried only small amounts of news from other countries—and revealed that many Americans were not aware of significant developments in other parts of a rapidly changing world.

    When the Soviet Union succeeded in putting a man into space, I urged my fellow Americans to applaud that achievement. I was an advocate of cooperation between the two powerful nations. I proposed that a statue be presented to the people of the Soviet Union as a gift from the American people just as the gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty from France symbolized friendship between two great nations.

    My proposal came to the attention of leaders of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. Citizens’ Dialogue, which had been promoting exchange visits since 1979 to create “trust and understanding” between the two countries. I was one of 29 Americans invited to make a trip to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1983. I made a speech in the Kremlin, emphasizing the dangers of nuclear weapons. I said that those weapons endangered the survival of life on earth.

    I also told the Soviets about my participation in efforts to establish a National Peace Academy. The Academy was dedicated to the education and training of professional peacemakers and to the dissemination of information about the developing art of peaceful conflict resolution. I had participated in a citizen’s movement with 30,000 members, which led to the approval of the Peace Academy project by both houses of Congress and the construction of a U.S. Institute of Peace on the mall in Washington.

    The part of my speech in Moscow, which aroused the most discussion, was my suggestion that either the U.S. or the Soviet Union should dismantle half of its nuclear weapons and invite the world to witness that event. “Would not that nation open a new era, with humanity set free from the nightmare of a nuclear war?” I asked the Soviet leaders who took part in our dialogue. Afterwards, a Soviet official approached me and said that he personally liked the idea. Then he added: “But wouldn’t the nation that endorsed such a proposal be accused of weakness?”

    I said that I didn’t think that the building of thousands of such bombs should be considered a sign of strength. The arms race is a road to planetary suicide, I said. Why do you consider the present situation as a state of progress? The American people believe that you are prepared to inflict catastrophic blows on the Western countries—and you believe that we are prepared to kill millions of men, women, and children in the Soviet nations.

    When I visited Moscow and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1983, the Soviets like Brezhnev were believed to be firmly in control of enormous forces. None of the commentators predicted the rise of a Gorbachev and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet empire. No one predicted that Ronald Reagan, a right-wing Republican, would take big steps to end the Cold War.

    On my visit to the Soviet Union in 1983, I found that the people there had a deep fear of another war. Many young people had seen films and television programs that depicted how many things Americans had—houses, cars, many personal possessions. The Soviet young people no longer believed in the promises of communism. They wanted to be free to pursue happiness in the American style. When I came back and reported on their commitment to peace and their friendliness toward Americans, many people in Santa Barbara thought I had been brainwashed and deceived. When I reminded them that President Truman had predicted to me that the Soviet system would collapse—and that Russia would seek friendly relations with the United States—many Americans did not accept such a hopeful view of the future.

    Like Truman, however, I had come close to death many times, and I shared his deep feeling that human beings could be “glorious beings,” eventually capable of building a global society. I shared his admiration for the poem by Alfred Tennyson entitled” Locksley Hall,” written in 1842. Truman carried a copy of it in his wallet, and frequently referred to it.

    The English author wrote:

    “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
    Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that could be;
    Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
    Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
    Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
    From the nations’ aerial navies grappling in the central blue;
    Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
    In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world…”

    I was amazed by Tennyson’s predictions in that poem and pleased by Truman’s long look forward. But I, too, had expected human beings to build a planetary organization and enter into a global acceptance of all creeds and cultures.

    When I worked on the Democratic platform, which Truman advocated in his 1948 campaign, we approved statements supporting “the effective international control of all weapons of mass destruction, including the atomic bomb.” Truman insisted that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified steps to end the most terrible war in history but he did not want to place such power in the hands of national leaders in any conflict in the future. If Truman’s plans for international control over nuclear weapons had been adopted, the insane nuclear arms race of the last 50 years could have been avoided—and humanity could not have been brought to the brink of annihilation in later confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

    That 1948 platform also endorsed Truman’s recognition of the state of Israel and the help he had given to the new Jewish nation to survive during the bloody conflicts in Palestine.

    Truman was accused of acting emotionally—succumbing to the pleas of Eddie Jacobson, his former partner in a clothing store, and other Jewish friends—or of pandering to the wealthy American Jews who gave large amounts of money to his candidacy and other nominees of the Democratic Party. But I and others who worked on that 1948 platform knew that the president was genuinely convinced that the Jewish people should have a homeland. His primary motivation came from his reading of the Bible. His religious faith came from the scriptures in that book regarded as holy by Jews and Christians.

    Truman was one of the few American leaders who tried to save the Jews from Hitler’s concentration camps. In April 1943, after he learned that Jews had been herded into slaughter houses “like animals,” he voiced his indignation in a fiery speech to 125,000 persons in a Chicago stadium. Saying that “no one can any longer doubt the horrible intentions of the Nazi beasts,” Truman urged all the governments then at war with the Nazis to help the Jews before it was too late. He asked for the opening of “free lands” for the Jews and other persecuted minorities.

    If his plea had been heeded, millions of lives could have been saved—including thousands of the most gifted people who ever lived on this planet. It is still impossible to accept the failures of many of the people (including myself) who did little to save the human beings destroyed by the racist Nazis. “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.” He begged all of us to “draw deeply on our traditions of aid to the oppressed—and our great national generosity.” He said: “This is not a Jewish problem, it is an American problem—and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.”

    We did not face it squarely and honorably on the scale that it called for. We did finally join other nations in crushing Hitler’s Nazis and the Japanese warlords. As a member of General Patton’s Third Army, I had the joy of liberating Paris from the German occupation forces in 1944. I must note that it was the humanity of a German general—commander of the Nazi forces in Paris—that kept Paris from being destroyed. Hitler had ordered that general to set the city on fire, but he refused to do it. Hitler died in the wreckage of his bomb shelter in Berlin.

    In the years since World War II, there have been many savage events on our planet. The United Nations—created by Truman and other farsighted leaders in 1945—has not been as effective as its founders and supporters hoped that it would be. The destructive forces that have been manifested all through the long history of human beings have produced wars, persecutions of minorities, mass killings, the committing of tortures against international law, have made me wonder whether we will ever evolve into the “glorious beings” we were designed to be.

    But we now have an International Bill of Rights drafted by leaders in many countries—and there is a growing awareness of the fundamental value of every person in the developing world culture. President Truman in his inaugural address in 1949 declared that every person is entitled to “a decent, satisfying life.”

    The fact that we live in a nuclear age when enough weapons exist to destroy all nations and bring down our whole civilization must awaken in every one of us a sense of personal responsibility for getting rid of those weapons. The leaders of the nuclear powers are not carrying out that vital task. So we the people must demand action to get every government to act for human survival.

    The Declaration if Interdependence adopted by this Institute on July 4 thirty years ago indicates the right path for humanity’s future. Let me remind you of the 10 points in that great statement:

    1. To explore the classical and renaissance traditions of East and West—and their continuing relevance to emerging modes and patterns of living;
    2. To renew the universal vision behind the American Dream through authentic affirmations of freedom, excellence and self-transcendence in an ever-evolving Republic of Conscience;
    3. To honor through appropriate observance the contributions of men and women of all ages to world culture;
    4. To enhance the enjoyment of the creative artistry and craftsmanship of all cultures;
    5. To deepen awareness of the universality of humanity’s spiritual striving and its rich varieties of expression in the religions, philosophies and literatures of humanity;
    6. To promote forums for fearless inquiry and constructive dialogue concerning the frontiers of science, the therapeutics of self-transformation, and the societies of the future;
    7. To investigate the imaginative use of the spiritual, mental and material resources of the planet in the service of universal welfare;
    8. To examine changing social structures in terms of the principle that a world culture is greater than the sum of its parts and to envision the conditions, prospects and possibilities of the world civilization of the future;
    9. To assist in the emergence of men and women of universal culture, capable of continuous growth in non-violence of mind, generosity of heart, and harmony of soul. I call these persons “glorious beings”;
    10. To promote universal brotherhood and to foster human fellowship among all races, nations and cultures.

    Many of the topics were the subjects of long dialogues I had in the 1950s with Raghavan and Nandini Iyer when I served as vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The Iyers—and their brilliant son, Pico—certainly had the qualities of “glorious beings” and I want to express my gratitude for the inspirations they gave to me and to many others, including the founders of this Institute.

    In closing, I want to thank all of you who participated in our meeting here tonight. You affirm my belief in the statement of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said: “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end”

    We are all rising together in Eternity’s sunrise!

    Frank K. Kelly, Senior Vice President, is a former speech writer for President Truman and staff director of the U.S. Senate Majority Policy Committee. He served for 17 years as Vice President of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
  • Our Global Cinderella

    The announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 has been awarded to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, should remind us of the crucial activities performed by the United Nations.

    The IAEA, of course, is the U.N. agency that has worked, with considerable effectiveness, to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Hundreds of nuclear facilities are monitored by the IAEA in over 70 countries. Among its other activities, it led the search for what the U.S. government claimed were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and, in 2003, reported that it could not verify the U.S. contention. If the Bush administration had listened to its advice rather than to that of individuals who lied and distorted the truth about such weapons, the United States would never have rushed into a bloody, expensive, and futile war in that land.

    But this is only a small part of the U.N. record. Consider the following:

    • The U.N. has vigorously promoted economic and social development in impoverished nations. UNICEF alone is active in 157 countries, pouring $1.2 billion a year into child protection, immunization, fighting HIV/AIDS, girls’ education, and other ventures.
    • The U.N. has sponsored free and fair elections, including monitoring and advice, in numerous lands, including Cambodia, Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, South Africa, Kosovo, and East Timor.
    • Since the General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the U.N. has fostered the enactment of dozens of comprehensive agreements on civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights.
    • Over the years, the U.N. has dispatched 60 peacekeeping and observer missions—16 of them currently in operation–to world trouble spots, saving millions of people from mass violence and war.
    • The U.N. assisted in negotiating some 170 peace settlements ending regional conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war, civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the use of Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
    • The U.N. facilitated the decolonization of more than 80 countries, with almost a third of the world’s population.
    • Through its imposition of international measures ranging from an arms embargo to a convention against racially segregated sporting events, the U.N. played a key role in bringing an end to apartheid in South Africa and in transforming that country into a democratic nation.
    • Through the efforts of the U.N., more than 500 international treaties—on human rights, terrorism, refugees, disarmament, and the oceans—were enacted.
    • The U.N. has aided more than 50 million refugees fleeing war, famine, or persecution, including over 19 million of them—mostly women and children—who are today receiving food, shelter, medical aid, education, and repatriation assistance.
    • The U.N. sponsored world women’s conferences that set the agenda for advancing women’s rights, including the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which has been ratified by 180 countries.
    • The U.N.’s World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian agency, feeds some 90 million hungry people in 80 countries every year.

    And these are only some of the many accomplishments of the world organization.

    For Americans, this worldwide program is quite a bargain. The cost to every American of the regular budget of the United Nations is slightly more than $1 a year—less than the price of a soda. Actually, the cost is lower than it is supposed to be. U.N. budget contributions are calculated according to each nation’s share of the global economy which, in the case of the United States, is 34 percent. But the U.S. government has unilaterally set a cap on its contributions at 22 percent. By contrast, the Japanese pay closer to $2 per person. That $1 a year for the U.N. might also be compared to the annual cost of the U.S. military budget to every American man, women, and child: $1,600!

    Unfortunately, the U.S. government doesn’t appear to consider U.N. activities a bargain at all. In June 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation (H.R. 2745) mandating cuts to the U.S. contribution to the U.N. and blocking U.S. contributions to new U.N. peacekeeping missions if the world organization does not agree to a list of items dictated by Washington. More recently, similar legislation was introduced into the U.S. Senate (S. 1394 and 1383).

    Nor is such behavior limited to Congress. The Bush administration has also sought to undermine the U.N. By nominating John Bolton—a U.S. government official who repeatedly expressed contempt for U.N. operations–to serve as U.S. ambassador to the world body, President George W. Bush made this clear enough and, thereby, created a scandal of major proportions. When the choice of Bolton proved too much for even the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate to stomach, Bush gave Bolton the job through a recess appointment.

    In the context of the furor over Bolton’s nomination, one would have expected him to adopt a cautious, low-key approach at the U.N. Instead, however, Bolton threw months of delicate negotiations over the September 2005 U.N. summit conference into disarray by proposing more than 700 changes to what seemed to many countries to be a near-final agreement. Ultimately, the agreement unraveled, and a number of potential advances went down the drain.

    The Bush administration has been just as critical of the U.N.’s Mohamed ElBaradei, who, by talking of the responsibilities of the nuclear powers as well as the non-nuclear powers under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has refused to accept the U.S. government’s double standard as to nuclear weapons. As the New York Times reported on October 7: “Mr. ElBaradei won a third term as chief of the I.A.E.A. earlier this year despite opposition from Washington. He had overwhelming support from the rest of the world community.” Commenting on his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, ElBaradei was less direct about his difficulties with the U.S. government, but his meaning was clear enough. “The prize will strengthen my resolve and that of my colleagues,” he said, “to speak truth to power.”

    And so the Cinderella story of the United Nations continues. Despite the U.N.’s vital role in world affairs, the United States and—to a lesser extent—the other great powers are determined to keep it weak and impoverished. Unfortunately, in this case there is no Prince Charming to push past the wicked stepmother and stepsisters and reward Cinderella for her virtue. But, hopefully, the public, like the Nobel committee, recognizes that, despite the arrogant, self-interested, and reckless behavior of powerful nation-states, a global institution exists that serves all of humanity.

    Dr. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

    Originally published by the History News Network.

  • On Eve of World Summit, Hurricane Bolton Threatens to Wreak Havoc on the Global Poor

    One of the truly heart-warming reactions to the suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina is the response from the international community. The Red Cross received thousands of donations from individual foreigners—rich and poor—whose hearts went out to the victims. The governments of over 60 nations offered everything from helicopters, ships, water pumps and generators to doctors, divers and civil engineers. Poor countries devastated by last year’s tsunami have sent financial contributions. Governments at odds with the Bush administration— Cuba, Venezuela and Iran—offered doctors, medicines and cheap oil. The international response has been so overwhelming that the United Nations has placed personnel in the Hurricane Operations Center of the US Agency for International Development to help coordinate the aid.

    Unbeknownst to the US public, however, at the very time impoverished Americans are being showered with support from the world community, the Bush administration’s newly appointed UN ambassador, John Bolton, has been waging an all-out attack on the global poor.

    Tomorrow, September 14, over 175 heads of state will gather in New York for the World Summit. One of the major items on the agenda is global poverty. Back in 2000, 191 nations listened to the desperate cry of the world’s poor and developed a comprehensive list to eradicate poverty called the Millennium Development Goals. The goals, to be achieved by 2015, were to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality, stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, improve maternal health and reverse the loss of environmental resources. To achieve these ambitious goals, the rich countries made a commitment to spend 0.7 percent of gross domestic product on development. The upcoming Summit was supposed to review the progress toward achieving these goals.

    But even before the first world leader landed in New York, John Bolton threw the process in turmoil. In a letter to the other 190 UN member states, Bolton wrote that the United States “does not accept global aid targets”—a clear break with the pledge agreed to by the Clinton administration. (While some countries, including Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have already reached the aid target of 0.7 percent, the United States lags far behind, spending a mere 0.16 percent of its GDP on development.)

    Bolton wanted these goals to be eliminated from the document being prepared for the World Summit leaders to sign. In fact, Bolton stunned negotiators when less than one month before the Summit, he introduced over 500 amendments to the 39-page draft document that UN representatives had been painstakingly negotiating for the past year.

    The administration publicly complained that the document’s section on poverty was too long and instead called for greater focus on free-market reforms. But those free market reforms did not include encouraging corporations to promote the public good. On the contrary. Bolton wanted to eliminate references to “corporate accountability.” And he went even further, trying to strike the section that called on the pharmaceutical companies to make anti-retroviral drugs affordable and accessible to people in Africa with HIV/AIDS. Bolton’s message that corporate profits should take preference over social needs offers no comfort to the 30,000 poor who die daily from needless hunger and curable diseases.

    In another area that severely impacts the world’s poor—climate change— Bolton has been equally brutal. While Hurricane Katrina was lashing the Gulf states, Bolton was slashing the global consensus that “climate change is a serious and long-term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the world.” Not only did he attempt to wipe out any references to meeting any obligations outlined in the Kyoto Protocol, but he also stunned negotiators when, in the section on the UN’s core values, he tried to cut the phrase “respect for nature”.

    Finally, with global resources that could used to alleviate poverty instead going into the never-ending arms race, Bolton’s agenda moves us in the direction of an even more dangerous and violent world. He tried to eliminate the principle that the use of force should be considered as an instrument of last resort, slash references to the International Criminal Court and calls for the nuclear powers to make greater progress toward dismantling their nuclear weapons, and cut language that would discourage Security Council members from blocking actions to end genocide.

    John Bolton’s slash-and-burn style has convinced many global leaders that the US agenda is not to reform the United Nations but to gut it. In fact, Bolton even called for deleting a clause saying the United Nations should be provided with “the resources needed to fully implement its mandates.”

    The Bolton/Bush agenda reflects a misguided belief that absolute US sovereignty should take precedence over international cooperation. It also sends a message that the US government feels no responsibility towards—or compassion for—the world’s poor.

    UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has urged the United States to back down and reaffirm its support for the millennium development goals, goals that he says have been embraced by the whole world as a way to help poor people who want to live in dignity. Even U.S. allies like Tony Blair have stepped in to try to stop Bolton from wrecking the Summit.

    The outcry from the global community is forcing Bolton to back down on some of his more outrageous demands. But the Bolton/Bush agenda still refuses to seriously address the critical issues of our times, ranging from global warming to the arms race to grinding poverty. We citizens must demand that our government’s face to the international world not be that of a mean-spirited, aggressive bully but one that reflects the compassion and commitment to alleviating suffering and environmental devastation that the world has shown us in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

    Please take a moment to fax John Bolton at http://www.globalexchange.org/getInvolved/actnow/bolton.html.

    Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of the international human rights group Global Exchange.