United in Hope

Malcolm Harper, Director of the United Nations Association, asserts that a strenuous promotion of a global 'Culture of Peace and Non- violence' is vital if the United Nations is to fufil its early promise.

Ever since the first UN Development Decade was inaugurated along with the Freedom from Hunger Campaign in the 1960s, many activists have worked tirelessly for a world genuinely free from both the threat and the reality of hunger, abject poverty, ill health, repression and environmental decline. That was the great age of the rapid growth of non-governmental development agencies like OXFAM and Christian Aid. Donor Governments committed themselves to allocating 0.7% of their Gross National Product (GNP) to official development assistance (ODA). We had seemingly boundless energy and supreme confidence that a genuinely new world was being created.

At the centre of this whole movement stood the United Nations with its Specialized Agencies, Programmes and Funds. They were seen as the spearhead of this action and, at least in appearance, Ministers from all member states were voicing their commitment to the cause and the UN as the deliverer of the necessary resources to make it all happen.

Today, in the twenty-first century, over 80% of the total United Nations budget is still being allocated for economic, social and environmental programmes. The Northern media almost totally ignore this fact and rarely report on what is being achieved in these vital sectors of the UN's ongoing work.

However, the harsh reality is that the UN is heavily constrained in achieving its goals by the meanness of so many of the donor member states. Its budgets in many key areas have been either frozen or have, in real terms, been cut in the past years; but the mandates given to it, often by the General Assembly, are increasing in both number and scope. When, for example, the UN's Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit I" in 1992 created the Commission on Sustainable Development to oversee the implementation of Agenda 21 - the blueprint for achieving global sustainable development and environmental protection - it was made clear to the UN Secretary-General that this must be achieved with no extra resources being allocated.

Very few Governments have achieved the target of 0.7% of GNP for ODA. The Irish Government last year announced a five year programme to achieve that objective; the United States allocates a paltry 0.1% (although President George W. Bush announced a modest increase at the UN's Financing for Development Conference in Mexico in March 2002) At the time of the British General Election in 1979, the UK's allocation had reached 0.5% but, by 1997, that figure had declined to around 0.26%. It currently stands at 0.33% and a major campaign is underway to seek an Irish-style commitment from the British Chancellor to map out a five-year roadmap to achieve 0.7%.

More promisingly, towards the end of the last century, a series of International Development Targets (IDTs) were agreed. They covered such key issues as access to primary education for every child - boys and girls equally - in the world, a considerable reduction in adult (and especially women's) illiteracy, and a major diminution in infant mortality. The year 2015 was set as the target date for their fulfilment. Then, in September 2000, the UN held a Millennium Summit in New York, at which a series of Millennium Summit goals were promulgated. Happily, the IDTs and these goals have been consolidated into a single package. However, if they are not going just to remain pious hopes, action needs to start now and adequate resources - human, financial, other - must be allocated immediately and must be sustained each year. It will be disastrous if no real action is taken until 2012 leading to a mad race against time to get at least something achieved by 2015.

The key factor in achieving real change through the UN is to recognise that the United Nations is only as good at any point in time as its members want it to be. In that sense, it is a club, notionally with equality between the members. In reality, of course, that equality does not fully exist. The veto right of the five permanent members of the Security Council, weighted voting systems in the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and the very considerable influence that the most powerful member states can bring to bear on others in the General Assembly, the Specialized Agencies and elsewhere are vivid evidence of that.

In the 1980s and 1990s narrow nationalistic self-interest increasingly dominated the policies of a number of those powerful members. This brought them into a collision with the principles of multilateral co-operation enshrined in the United Nations Charter. At the moment, the marked unilateralist and very self-interested focus of the current United States Administration in a whole host of areas has exacerbated that tension. Overall - and the present UK Government is a very refreshing exception - many donor countries have been reducing their allocations to the United Nations (voluntary) programmes and funds- such as UNICEF (children's fund) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This is making it almost impossible for the UN to play the key role which is vital for the achieving of the Millennium Summit goals and much more besides.

The alternative and better way forward in the new era, according to UNESCO, would be through the basic adoption of the 'Culture of Peace and Non-Violence' in place of the millennia-old 'Culture of War'. The old Roman adage - if you want peace, prepare for war - which summarized the Culture of War has to be replaced by an approach which agreed to eschew war and to seek to resolve potentially violent conflicts through a willingness to negotiate solutions in a non-violent manner. With the advent of sophisticated weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical and nuclear - and their threatened proliferation, running parallel with the development of ever more lethal "conventional" weapons, this seems like very sound advice. Except that virtually no Governments have really embraced it as a practical philosophical basis on which to develop their policies and relationships with others.

The Culture of Peace and Non-Violence must come to pervade everything that we do - as individuals, in our families, in our communities, in our places of study or work, in our national life, in our international relations and in such bodies as the United Nations, the Commonwealth, the European Union, NATO and other organizations. Under the overarching umbrella of the Culture of Peace and Non-Violence, the United Nations' priorities must include the following.

• The maintenance of international peace and security through a consistent and objective interpretation of its obligations under the UN Charter by a reformed and modernized Security Council. In 1992 - in those euphoric days immediately after the end of the Cold War when the Peace Dividend was all the rage - the Council commissioned a major set of proposals in its An Agenda for Peace, a visionary document but one which the Council has allowed to gather dust. The Brahimi Report of 2000 is another milestone in the efforts to strengthen the UN's peacekeeping capacity; but the Council still needs to move more creatively along the route of active deadly conflict prevention - avoiding such violence rather than trying to stop it when it has erupted.

This is a challenge which the Permanent Five on the Council in particular are all too ready to duck, with their dread of providing troops, police or other personnel for missions and running the risk of body bags being brought home. The British and French are bolder than the others; but the current fashion, in more robust situations - the Gulf War, Afghanistan and elsewhere - is to get the Council to authorize coalitions of the willing, which operate outside the direct control of the Council so that they can control the operation themselves. This ignores the fact that it is the objective and non-partisan capability of the UN which makes blue beret operations more acceptable to the local population in areas of potential or actual conflict. How much better it would be if the (objective) UN rather than the (significantly one-sided) US was seeking a genuine and just settlement in the Middle East and was charged to play the key international role in Afghanistan - as it did in Namibia, Moçambique, Cambodia and elsewhere.

• The engagement - at all levels - in serious arms control and disarmament negotiations. The urgency of the United Nations General Assembly holding a fourth Special Session on Disarmament, in order to agree the UN's arms control and disarmament agenda for the first part of the new century is very real. It would need to adopt a holistic agenda and to look at all aspects of disarmament in the context of the Culture of Peace and Non-Violence. At the same time, the current negative approach of the US Administration must be creatively challenged - National Missile Defense, the verification protocol for biological weapons, the weaponization of space, the decline of support for the chemical weapons secretariat and the very negative and wrecking approach of the US delegation at the 2001 UN Conference in New York on small arms and light weapons are examples of what must be avoided in the future.

• The implementation of the very considerable body of international human rights law across a wide range of issues which the UN has brought into being since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. As Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, the UN had spent 50 years promulgating and securing member states' adherence to human rights Conventions; the next fifty years must concentrate on securing their full implementation of what they have signed up to.

• The promotion of the international criminal jurisdiction through full support - and adequate resourcing - of the International Criminal Court, now that it has been created. Those member states which are not yet party to its Statute must be encouraged to come on board. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said when the 60th ratification of the Statute was secured, impunity for those charged with the crime of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity will increasingly become something of the past.

• The full implementation - in the letter and spirit of the Convention - of the principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Current attitudes towards asylum seekers in the European Union, Australia and elsewhere are a cause of very deep concern. The revival of the far right in Europe and the equation of migrants and asylum seekers by too many politicians, media editors and others - is causing a fearsome xenophobia to grow.

Alongside asylum seekers and refugees, the rights of internally displaced people (IDPs) are in urgent need of strengthening. So, too, are those of migrants and their families.

• The continuation of the strenuous challenge to all aspects of gender inequality throughout the world, not allowing suspect arguments of so- called "cultural differences" to deflect the UN from this vital aspect of human rights and development.

• Ensuring that the processes of so-called globalization are undertaken in harmony with environmental requirements and social equity. Those which are not should be strenuously opposed. In this context, it is surely imperative for the World Trade Organization to be integrated into the UN system and for it to be required to legislate trade regulations in conformity with labour standards as promulgated by the International Labour Organization, UN environmental Conventions and Protocols and other such relevant mechanisms.

• The full integration of all aspects of the UN's economic, social and environmental priorities, as discussed earlier in this paper, into this holistic approach. The major challenges of HIV/AIDS, of basic health care, of adequate diets and sufficient food availability, of potable water for all, of free access for all to education (certainly primary and preferably secondary, too), of fair employment opportunities, of adequate housing and of all other aspects of sustainable development are key priorities for the UN, even if the media have largely grown bored of them.

We must hope that the crises through which we are passing and which have been made much more real for us all by the appalling atrocities in the United States of America on 11th September 2001 will mobilize public opinion in support of a truly strengthened and properly resourced United Nations. We must hope that greater numbers come to see how totally indispensable the UN is for the achieving of a more just world for us all and that, without universal justice, none of us will ever live in a truly secure environment.

Of course, the UN is imperfect; but it has achieved so much since 1945 and, without it, what might have happened - in Cuba in 1962 and elsewhere - simply does not bear thinking about.

I just hope that the UN will go from strength to strength and that we shall all benefit from everything that it has on offer as the world becomes a more just, more happy and more equitable a planet.

Placed on Fabian Global Forum, July 2002