Financing of UN organizations is erratic and distorted, the authors argue, so they recommend an independent commission to better manage the situation. Two such organizations, the UN Environment Program and Unesco, operate the Great Apes Survival Partnership, which aims to thwart the extinction of gorillas and other apes in equatorial Africa and southeast Asia.
GENEVA — Change is in the air again on First Avenue. Among numerous reform options being bandied about, none will be more consequential than those on financing the United Nations system.
There are the sledgehammer arguments: drastic slashes in funding by Washington and other donors could precipitate dramatic change. As we have argued in these pages, however, such cuts could also help focus the UN’s collective mind, demanding that the system’s development and humanitarian organizations achieve more with less. That would also require asking tough questions about comparative advantages and cutting superfluous activities to be accomplished more effectively outside the UN system.
However, it is as much the patterns as overall levels of funding that already seriously undermine the system’s potential. In a new study published by Sweden’s expert group for aid studies, we highlight two major problems arising from the financing of the UN funds and programs: haphazard patterns of funding; and distortions from the growing preponderance of earmarked funding.
Financing practices in the UN reflect history and expediency. Member states created the 13 funds and programs over seven decades, starting with Unicef in 1946 and ending with UN Women in 2010. The growth has responded to perceived development and humanitarian needs, although no blueprint could have anticipated the system’s size and shape. Moreover, there has been no attempt to raise and allocate resources rationally to reflect the nature of the varying mandates or each organization’s relevance and effectiveness.
The “big four” funds and programs — Unicef, World Food Program, UN Development Program and UN Refugee Agency — are still “voluntary,” requiring nonstop fund-raising campaigns, mostly from wealthy member states. Annual budgeting, subject to the vagaries of official development aid, is hardly a recipe for sustained capacity development. The only exception to the 100-percent voluntary budgets is a trivial allocation to the UN refugee agency from the UN’s assessed biennial budget.
For the smaller organizations, contributions from the UN’s core budget — subscribed by every UN member state — vary from some 30 percent for the UN Environmental Program and UN Conference on Trade and Development to much less than 10 percent despite one of the most far-reaching mandates of any UN body, encompassing drug control, international crime, trafficking and corruption.
With zero or negative growth in the UN’s core budget, the exact amounts reflect the ability of each organization to lobby before internal budget committees. There are no criteria of performance, no objective impact assessments and no evaluation of continuing relevance. For example, although global trade negotiations have migrated from the UN to the World Trade Organization, there has been no diminution in assessed budget allocations to the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
Core funding for the funds and programs, whether the paltry amounts from the assessed budget or from voluntary contributions, has stagnated or declined, particularly in this century. All such UN bodies have thus come to rely on voluntary “noncore” contributions, which donors restrict to countries and themes of special interest to them.
UN organizations resemble various-size dogs. Whether large or small, they are being wagged by growing tails. In addition to bilateral donors, other multilateral organizations — especially the world’s largest donor, the European Commission — and the large specialized vertical funds in the health and environment fields are also major contributors.
The result is the loss of direct control, turning UN funds and programs into implementers of donor priorities. UN organizations are diverted into managing and reporting on numerous projects for each patron, spreading core staff resources thinly while donors press for reduced overheads. The competitive chase after noncore resources also worsens an already atomized UN family, resulting in more overlap, duplication and competition for turf.
Can anything be done?
Donors should be encouraged to increase their core contributions and support pooled resources into multiagency funds. Noncore or earmarked funding should be channeled into areas in which the UN has an acknowledged comparative advantage: in norm and standard-setting and global conventions (like the Paris climate agreement in 2015). Such tied funding should reinforce mandates and avoid duplication.
This recommendation particularly applies to the UN Development Program, whose responsibilities as coordinator for the UN development system conflict with its growing panoply of operational activities in competition with other organizations.
Funds and programmes should justify their use of core resources and overheads. They should also be prepared to “say no” to offers of noncore funding, however financially tempting, that fall outside their core mandates and often entail distracting and onerous conditions.
The report recommends creating an independent funding commission. The starting point is to standardize definitions and nomenclature — accurate statistics simply do not exist. The commission would also identify the areas where the activities of the funds and programs overlap and recommend rationalizations and mergers.
This autonomous effort — outside the UN secretariat’s control — would be an essential building block for the “funding compact” that Secretary-General António Guterres proposed to the Economic and Social Council in July to make the system more capable of supporting the 2030 Agenda.
David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program, visiting Sanaa, Yemen, where the world’s worst hunger crisis has been unfolding for at least a year. MARCO FRATTINI/WFP
David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, based in Rome, posted a prayer at the top of his Twitter page in early January, reading: “My prayer for 2018: Peace. Our path to Zero Hunger begins with peace.”
The page, @dbeasley1, is a hybrid of personal tweets and professional news about his work at the United Nations agency. His descriptor reads: “Married to Mary Wood. Four children. Follower of Jesus. Executive Director of the World Food Programme.” In the background of his photo is an image of the UN flag.
He has another Twitter account, @WFPChief, which is strictly professional and has no references to religion. On his new Facebook page, Beasley injects his professional activities with news about his personal life, like a family trip to Venice.
A governor of South Carolina from 1995 to 1999, Beasley was nominated for the UN post by another ex-governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, who likes to combine feel-good sayings with information about her Saturday night outings and meetings with foreign ministers on her Twitter page.
Haley is the United States envoy to the UN and a member of the Trump cabinet. In a letter she sent in February 2017 to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, obtained by PassBlue, she recommended Beasley for the UN position, signing the letter, “God bless.”
Given that Beasley now runs the world’s largest humanitarian-aid agency, how appropriate is it for him to declare his religious beliefs so openly? Some experts on the UN and those inside the organization who were interviewed for this article said they were uncomfortable by his doing so, while others thought he needed to just be more discreet.
“I’d say that it really does make people uneasy,” said Jean Krasno, director of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York. The religious affiliation of, say, UN secretaries-general has been clear, Krasno added, but “it was never implied that it would influence their policies.”
The extent of Beasley’s “follower of Jesus” beliefs influencing policy at the World Food Program is hard to gauge, but as soft power it could be subtle. The agency serves 75 countries and is financed entirely through donations, with the US being the biggest donor.
“Religious parochialism could interfere with the UN’s primary mission of providing food aid,” said Ruth Wedgwood, who chairs the international law program at Johns Hopkins University. “The millions of people represented at the United Nations include many cultures and many states. It could be seen as parochial and exclusionary to focus on one religion while excluding others. The moral vocation of feeding the hungry remains essential regardless of the religious choices of persons in need. ”
Beasley is operating with a five-year strategy that was adopted by the agency’s board before he came to Rome, so that has not changed. Yet the fact that he is declaring his religious faith in such a public way, Krasno said, suggests he is proselytizing.
“It’s completely inappropriate,” said Krasno, who is organizing the papers of former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “Doing so flies in the face of UN norms.”
Personally stating one’s religious credo expresses a “bias” that “verges on the unethical,” Krasno added, “especially as religious tensions run high across the world.”
The religious declaration doesn’t stop with Beasley at the agency. His communications adviser, Gary Karr, says on his Twitter page that he, too, is a “follower of Jesus.” He also writes: “. . . husband, Dad, Comms adviser to @WFPChief. PR Pro focused on quotes, messages, stories in traditional and digital media. Very artisanal.” Karr was Beasley’s press adviser when he was governor of South Carolina.
Karr responded to PassBlue’s request for comment about Beasley’s Twitter page by saying that the @davidbeasly1 account is his “personal Twitter bio” and that Karr’s is “personal and not official” as well.
“On the Executive Director’s personal Twitter bio, it is not a reference to a religion, but a reference that he tries to follow the teachings of Jesus,” Karr added. “He has said for decades, in speeches all over the world and to varying audiences, that whether one sees Jesus as a man, a prophet or a savior, the teachings of ‘love your neighbour’ transcends all religions and cultures. . . . Also, Executive Director Beasley has for decades promoted respect for people of all faiths or of no faith.”
One person who works for the World Food Program and asked to remain anonymous, expressed concern to PassBlue about Beasley’s religious references and “what seems to be a conservative, economic-focussed agenda, where the principles and values upon which the UN was founded are not being heard or felt.”
In Beasley’s holiday message to the World Food Program staff, he said, “The ancient scriptures teach us to love one another. As we reflect on this during the holiday season, I thank you for being a part of the World Food Program family which shares this love and kindness with the hungry and the vulnerable.”
Jeffrey Laurenti, a long-time UN analyst with UNA-USA and the Century Foundation, said that the Christian declaration of Beasley could benefit the UN.
“I would hope he would know where he must draw the line on expressing personal sectarian convictions in order to work successfully with everyone on the global stage,” Laurenti said. “Jesus Christ could appropriately be his inspiration for doing this work, and certainly not a matter of reproach. Indeed, anything that ties conservative religious constituencies in the United States to the work of the UN could help secure the survival of the UN in domestic American politics.”
But bringing “Jesus as his ‘personal savior’ into the boardroom [of WFP],” Laurenti added, “would be a huge problem because even most Christians internationally don’t express their faith in that very Southern evangelical way — and four-fifths of the world do not profess Christianity at all.”
Beasley had no experience running an international food-aid agency when Guterres picked him for the UN position, though he had led trade missions overseas as governor. His appointment last year to the UN “alarmed some diplomats and good governance advocates,” Colum Lynch of Foreign Policy wrote at the time, because of Beasley’s inexperience and the push by Haley on Guterres.
Nevertheless, Beasley arrived in Rome in April 2017 as the world contended with four famine threats, which have been averted for now: in northern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, all conditions related to war and drought. “It’s been like drinking water out of a fire hydrant,” Beasley said in an interview when he first took the UN job.
The agency was conceived in 1961, when George McGovern, as director of the US Food for Peace Program, proposed a multilateral aid program providing “shared relief,” as Laurenti put it, for the hungry overseas and for US and other Western farmers to unburden their surplus crops. Its first executive director was Dutch, Addeke Boerma, and its maiden food drop occurred in northern Iran, after it was struck by an earthquake: 1,500 metric tons of wheat, 270 tons of sugar and 27 tons of tea were sent to survivors.
Besides delivering food, the agency has evolved to giving cash and coupons to feed people while enhancing local economies. Catherine Bertini became the first American — and woman — to head the agency in 1992, leading the way for US takeover of the executive director’s office since then. As of Jan. 15, 2018, the US had donated $2.5 billion to the agency; the other top donors are the European Union, at $1.2 billion, and Germany, $925 million. In November, Beasley told the agency’s board that the US contribution did not drop, despite such possibilities under the Trump administration, because of strong support in Congress.
During his term as South Carolina governor, Beasley proclaimed his Christian faith publicly, which Haley did as well in that role. Beasley had originally been a Democrat but switched to the Republican Party in 1991, saying that the Democrats’ policies were bad for families and for America.
He lost his second run for the governorship partly because he had recommended moving the Confederate flag from the State House dome. (It was moved elsewhere on the grounds and permanently removed by Haley in 2015.) After he left the governor’s office, Beasley received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2003 for his flag-moving recommendation.
In 2005, Beasley founded the Center for Global Strategies with Henry Deneen, a South Carolinian who was Beasley’s chief legal counsel when he was governor. The center, its website says, is a “nonprofit organization connecting businesspeople to international initiatives.” The website promotes the work of a crisis-pregnancy organization in Macedonia, called A Beating Heart. It is described as the “first and only pro-life crisis pregnancy center in Macedonia” that is “dedicated to counseling and helping women while promoting the value of life and the baby’s right to be born.”
The roots of Christian-professed leaders running the UN food agencies hark back in recent times to Tony Hall, an American politician who has had an illustrious career fighting global hunger, having been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize several times. For advice at the World Food Program, Beasley has turned to Hall, who is also a former Democratic congressman from Ohio and was the US ambassador to the UN agencies in Rome under President George W. Bush.
Hall and Beasley got to know each other working on the annual Washington-based National Prayer Breakfast and are close friends. The breakfast is connected to the Fellowship Foundation, a national group well documented for its influential political members and secretive meetings. Its mission is to, in brief, “adhere to the teachings and precepts of Jesus.”
Another member of Beasley’s inner circle at the World Food Program is also a protégé of Hall: David Austin worked for him when he ran the Rome agencies; Austin, too, is a member of the Fellowship Foundation, a connection that also makes some World Food Program staff members queasy.
Throughout Beasley’s political career, he fit the Republican ideal of shrinking government. When he was governor, he made “Putting Families First” the theme of his administration as it returned “power to the taxpayers,” so much so that he bragged that the “average homeowner in South Carolina pays no school operating taxes” while he also drastically cut welfare in the state.
Beasley has obviously taken a quantum leap from South Carolina politics to ending world hunger, and he may be the first to admit how complicated that goal is when trying to influence world leaders, as he referred to attendees at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he was interviewed.
“If we can end the conflicts, we can end world hunger,” he said, without mentioning specific crises, like Yemen. That war, led by Saudi Arabia and aided and abetted by the US, is edging into its fourth year, brimming with human catastrophes.
But the US — Nikki Haley — and others on the UN Security Council have been steering the war off the Council agenda. If Beasley knew why the Council remains so passive about the conflict and its toll on Yemenis, he didn’t dare say.
The UN Women agency is considering the use of blockchain technology to assist women and girls in crises like natural disasters. Karen Ellemann, a Danish government minister, above, addressing a simulation lab of blockchain use at the UN recently. RYAN BROWN/UN WOMEN
Blockchain technology emerged alongside Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency powering digital payments through a peer-to-peer system, currency trading and even, in some cases, black-market transactions. Now, some United Nations agencies are using blockchain to provide basic identification to refugees and others in developing countries as well as for specific actions like helping refugees obtain food rations in UN camps. More broadly, the use of blockchain could improve the efficiency of UN agencies, satisfying donors along the way.
As the name suggests, a blockchain is a series of blocks of information containing anything from financial transactions to personal identities. They can also store things like health care information or votes. The entries are strung together as they occur, so that each piece of information links to the ones before and after it. In addition, everyone on the blockchain has a copy of every transaction, therefore helping to prevent fraudulent changes to any singular block.
Blockchains are considered advantageous because they are decentralized. In a traditional ledger, an entity must moderate the transaction. For example, when you wire money to a person or other source, it must go through a bank or an institutional means before it reaches the recipient. But on a blockchain, middlemen are cut out, making transactions more efficient and accurate. Banks such as JPMorgan Chase are developing private blockchains to improve internal operations.
Yet because Bitcoin works on a blockchain, no bank can moderate transactions, and crimes like human trafficking and money laundering become harder to track. Users who engage in transactions on a blockchain create a code — a long number key that serves as their digital signature. If criminals are careless and reveal their key, their identity — and criminal history — are readily available for investigators. Researchers and law enforcement agencies are also figuring out ways to track the IP address of the buyer or seller to a specific computer and location.
Despite the dominant incarnation of its current use, blockchain technology can be used to promote social good, its proponents say. According to the World Bank, approximately 1.1 billion people cannot prove their identity for a wide range of reasons, leaving them stateless and powerless. This problem disproportionately affects women and children in developing countries in Africa and Asia.
Atefeh Riazi, the UN assistant secretary-general and chief information technology officer, is no stranger to blockchain technology. Speaking to humanitarians and students at the Institute for Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University last year, Riazi highlighted how a lack of identity hinders human rights.
“What are the implications when you don’t know how old you are?” Riazi said to the audience. “You can be drafted to military as a kid, you can be tried as an adult when you’re a child, you could be trafficked and nobody cares, nobody knows who you are. You could get married at age 9 or 10, when people think — or want to think — you’re 15. And most of the people impacted by lack of identity are girls and women.”
Some policymakers and innovators see blockchain technology as a way to solve such problems. ID2020 Alliance is a nonprofit organization financed by Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation that brings together public and private sectors to create legal identities for people who lack them. At ID2020’s second annual conference, held at the UN last June, attendees talked of using blockchain and biometric technologies to give everyone in the world an identity. This includes “the last girl” — the person in the world whose situation is so bleak that the chances of her getting a legal identity are nearly impossible.
At the conference, Microsoft and Accenture unveiled a new tool that combines blockchain and biometric data, such as retina scans and fingerprints, to give people access to their identity records anywhere, anytime. One major recipient of this technology would be refugees, who could gain access to their passport and other documents, even if the hard copies were destroyed or lost. Although the tool has yet to be deployed, refugees are already benefiting from blockchain technology.
The World Food Program, for example, started piloting “Building Blocks” last year. Up to 10,000 Syrian refugees in the Azraq camp in Jordan pay for their food using entitlements recorded on a blockchain system. Instead of using cash, vouchers or cards, refugees buy food using a retina scan. The system relies on biometric data registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The program was scheduled to end on May 31, 2017, but has been extended indefinitely.
“Digital cash and blockchain allow refugees to buy locally, helping them and the local economy,” Riazi said at the Fordham program. “It puts us in a different position by making us a catalyst. Blockchain can allow refugees to easily retrieve all their information such as their passport, birth certificate, diplomas, and other critical documents.”
Blockchain, she added, “will have a tremendous impact on our economy, financial markets, supply chain and identity while helping to reduce fraud and laundering.”
Blockchain technology’s uses are just beginning to be explored by other UN agencies. UN Women recently announced its own pilot program for cash transfers and identity powered by blockchain, directed toward women and girls in humanitarian-crisis settings, like natural disasters and wars.
As Yannick Glemarec, deputy executive director of UN Women, said at the agency’s announcement on blockchain technology, “Digital technologies can provide unprecedented solutions to address the fundamental needs of marginalized groups and those at the bottom of the pyramid.”
A participant at the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women conference in March 2016. RYAN BROWN/UN WOMEN
The annual meeting of the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women, held in New York every March, may be in trouble because of uncertainty and fear about the Trump administration’s attempt to ban immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. One major group has announced it is pulling out, and calls are being heard to move the meeting to the UN’s base in Geneva.
The 102-year-old Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom will not be participating this year in the global meeting. The league, based in Geneva, is the oldest women’s peace group in the world. It is led by Madeleine Rees, a lawyer who worked for the UN in Bosnia, where she helped expose sex trafficking by UN peacekeepers. Rees’s role was portrayed in a 2010 film, “The Whistleblower.”
In an announcement released on Feb. 9 and posted on its Twitter page, the league said that in light of the Trump ban announced on Jan. 27 as “a matter of principle, and in solidarity with our partners from excluded countries,” the group known as WILPF, which brings women from all over the world to participate in the annual UN conference, will not take part in the 61st Commission on the Status of Women session.
In explanation, it said, “WILPF warns that the absence of women from countries affected by the recent US travel ban undermines the basic premise of the CSW as being an inclusive and participatory process and threatens its legitimacy.” It did not acknowledge that the Trump ban has been frozen for now.
Another important feminist group, Apne Aap, founded by Ruchira Gupta, has dropped out of the conference in solidarity with women who cannot obtain visas to New York. Apne Aap is a grass-roots group focused on ending prostitution and sex trafficking in India.
The UN conference attracts thousands of women from governments, civil society and other walks of life to assess progress on women’s equality, gathering in workshops and other formats. It finishes with an “outcome document” that clarifies the annual theme and recommendations going forward.
This year, the theme is “women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work,” and the conference is March 13 to 24.
The overall mission of the commission, which was established by the UN’s Economic and Social Council and first met in 1947, is to “raise the status of women, irrespective of nationality, race, language or religion, to equality with men in all fields of human enterprise, and to eliminate all discrimination against women in the provisions of statutory law, in legal maxims or rules, or in interpretation of customary law.”
Given, however, the exclusionary nature of Trump’s immigration ban of people trying to enter the United States from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, the women’s league felt compelled to boycott the CSW, it said.
The travel ban is now in legal limbo, though, after American courts rejected Trump’s original plan. A new version is apparently being written by the White House.
“Women from the countries subject to the ban have either been denied visas or cannot, with any confidence, attend the CSW,” the league said in its statement in English and Arabic.
Even though the immigration ban was frozen by a US federal judge on Feb. 3, the decision was upheld by a federal appeals court and people from some of the banned countries are entering America again, there is much concern among many civil-rights parties and others that traveling into the US from the named countries could mean encountering difficulties.
Talk had been made by a handful of powerful groups lobbying to have the women’s conference postponed in New York and moved to Geneva, one person knowledgeable about the discussions told PassBlue. Most groups oppose this proposal, the person added.
Conflicts over the women’s conference amid the Trump ban have been brewing since the order was made, on Jan. 27. But there is no mention of tensions on the website of UN Women, the conference organizer and the lead entity at the UN promoting women worldwide.
The most public airing of problems with the 61st session appeared in an essay published in OpenDemocracy, the open-source journal. In an article by Lisa Davis and Yifat Susskind on Feb. 4, they wrote: “Every March, when the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meetings are held, women’s rights activists seize the chance to come to New York City, lobby global policymakers and collaborate with each other.
“Now, many are asking themselves how we keep the doors open for those activists from banned countries. Some are questioning if CSW should be postponed or even moved to Geneva, in solidarity with those who cannot attend.”
Davis is a human-rights advocacy director for Madre, a global organization based in New York that promotes women’s rights, and a professor at the City University of New York Law School. Susskind is the executive director of Madre. Their article said that canceling or moving the conference would not be fruitful.
“Far from it,” they wrote. “Substantial civil society participation at CSW in New York this year would be an act of solidarity, creating a critical show of resistance against autocracy and the US administration’s xenophobia and misogyny.”
Right now, they added, “we should be talking about how to best leverage CSW in New York to make a stand for global gender justice in this moment of crisis. Rather than accommodating Trump’s exclusionary agenda, we should be asking ourselves how to fortify and expand our movements amidst the global rise of right-wing authoritarianism, closing borders, and shrinking civil society spaces.”
Now that WILPF is “girlcotting” the conference, it could pave the way for more organizations to do the same, although none have stepped forward.
At the same time, the idea of holding the conference in New York and another in April in Geneva — for people who might not be able to attend in March — has been broached, said a person involved in discussions.
“If WILPF is ‘girlcotting,’ that is quite significant,” said Tanya Domi, an adjunct professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University who has worked on gender and other matters in the Western Balkans. “Led by the morally strong leadership of Madeleine Rees [of WILPF] — such an action sends a powerful message to the UN and its institutions.”
Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, an Iranian-born feminist who lives in the US and is executive director of the International Civil Society Action Network, also wrote in a Jan. 30 essay in OpenDemocracy about the possibility of women from banned countries being unable to attend the UN conference.
As to the recent move by WILPF and the CSW, Anderlini said in a recent email to PassBlue: “I’d like to see the UN itself inviting women from the 7 countries to open the CSW & keynote each day’s session. One member state cannot & should not determine who has access to UN events.”
“I appreciate the sentiment & wanting to hold CSW in a country that welcomes the citizens of all UN member states,” she added, about a meeting in Geneva. “So I think we should be everywhere — at CSW in New York & at alternate CSW gatherings elsewhere.”
Jessica Neuwirth, the founder of Donor Direct Action, which supports women’s-rights organizations “working on the front lines,” voiced a more optimistic note about the recent US legal decision on the immigration ban and its effects on the women’s conference.
“We were very glad to see that United States courts have halted implementation of the discriminatory measures President Trump attempted to put in place,” Neuwirth said in an email. “We are hopeful that American constitutional safeguards will continue to block discrimination on the basis of religion and national origin, in which case all those planning to attend the CSW would be able to do so.”
Larysa Ziobina, head of the newborn department at Kramatorsk maternity center, in Donetsk, Ukraine, said that since the war began, more women who come to the clinic are at risk of miscarriage and more newborns need intensive care. PHOTO COURTESY OF UNFPA
Imagine yourself a pregnant woman in Syria making her way on foot to a refugee camp when suddenly you go into labor. The United Nations Population Fund is there to save you and your baby’s life. That is what UNFPA does. I have seen their work on site in Mali and in Senegal.
President Trump has signed an executive order that says the United States will stop funding any foreign or international organization that promotes “the performance of abortion or sterilization as a method of family planning.” Even counseling or providing information on abortion would trigger a loss of US government contributions. Obviously, one target is the UN Population Fund, which, if truth be told, firmly rejects abortion as a method of family planning but promotes safe motherhood and access to a choice of contraceptives and gender equality, while also battling gender-based violence and AIDS.
This global gag rule, first enunciated through a policy announced in Mexico City at a UN population conference in 1984 by the Reagan administration, is part and parcel of Trump’s broad assault on the UN.
On July 22, 2002, when President George W. Bush canceled a contribution of $34 million to UNFPA, I was mad, really mad. As a retired French-language teacher and tennis coach in Redlands, Calif., I decided to ask 34 million people to take a stand for the women of the world with a donation of one dollar each. Lois Abraham had the same idea, and we became partners. This became a moderately successful grass-roots movement to which I gave my all. It made hundreds of thousands of people aware of UNFPA and its humanitarian work, and 34 Million Friends, www.34millionfriends.org, has garnered to date a lovely $4.3 million.
With envelopes pouring in to support the Population Fund, the agency invited Lois and me to New York in October 2002 to meet us two “crazy ladies” and present us at a press briefing. It so happened that during that same month, the agency’s US Committee (now called Friends of UNFPA) was sponsoring a Family of Woman exhibition in the lobby of the UN.
I was a member of the honorary committee for this exhibition, as was — guess who — Donald Trump. Doesn’t it stand to reason, then, that Trump fully supported UNFPA at the time and allowed his name to be used in conjunction with the one US organization raising money and awareness for the just-defunded UN Population Fund?
Now as president, Trump is clearly going to stiff the UN agency of US support, thereby restricting vulnerable women’s access to health and autonomy in making reproductive choices.
Ever since the election of Trump, I have labored over my plan to reinvigorate 34 Million Friends. I’m spending hours printing out my “contacts” documents and going through my 15 notebooks that summarize all my past travels and media appearances. People will say that political organizing should come before money-raising but I want people to do both. I’m thinking of asking individuals for $34 each this time, which would help train a midwife or buy contraceptive supplies. The women of the world have it tough, and the US under Trump has now made it tougher.
We the people can step into the breach. I, for one, deeply appreciate the hugely beneficial humanitarian function and work of the UN, and particularly the UN Population Fund, in our complex, difficult world.
On April 29, 2018, the 15 members of the UN Security Council visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh that houses 600,000 people. Here, Karen Pierce, the British ambassador, hugs a resident of the camp while Lise Gregoire-van Haaren, the deputy ambassador of Netherlands, is behind her. CAROLINE GLUCK/UN PHOTO
To provide readers who want information about the United Nations that is intelligent and concise yet comprehensive is a challenging task for every author: he or she must outline a puzzling system of principal organs, specialized agencies, programs, funds, commissions and committees that produces large piles of resolutions, declarations and conventions on topics such as peacekeeping, development assistance, global health, migration, environmental protection and human rights.
To provide a useful orientation in the seemingly chaotic UN system calls for somebody who has worked extensively inside it but who has also studied and analyzed it thoroughly from the outside: the author of such a book is Jacques Fomerand, a French political scientist and former UN official, who has done both. From 1977 till 1991, he worked in the UN Secretariat, and from 1992 to 2003, he was director of the New York office of the United Nations University. Retiring in 2003, he has been teaching in academic institutions in the United States and France.
Fomerand’s book, the second edition of the “Historical Dictionary of the United Nations,” published by Scarecrow Press in December 2017 (the first was published in 2007), contains more than 840 pages of updated information about the UN.
Why is the book titled “Historical Dictionary”? It contains both a historical analysis of the UN as well as a dictionary with entries from A to Z.
The initial chapters are dedicated to the history the UN: the first chapter consists of a detailed chronology, mapping out the expansion and differentiation of the organizational structures of the UN and the tasks of its organs. The chronology makes plain the abundance of tasks the world organization is dealing with: you can take any year you like and you will find a multitude of international conventions adopted by the General Assembly, numerous Security Council decisions on peacekeeping matters and human-rights violations as well as world conferences on global problems held by specialized agencies of the UN.
The densely packed schedule of meetings of the different UN bodies demonstrates impressively the broad range of UN activities and the necessity to tackle many global problems promptly and efficiently.
While the chronology provides an informative overview on UN activities, the second chapter, an “introduction,” weighs the achievements and failures of the UN in its main fields of work. Fomerand has written it in the form of a long essay of about 60 pages in elegant English.
It outlines the institutional developments of the UN in reaction to the changing system of international relations and relates the scope of UN activities explicitly to the national interests of its member states, saying, “The United Nations is rarely more than the sum of its parts, and generally it mirrors the divisions as well as the hopes and convictions of the world’s governments.”
While the chronology addresses apparently students and journalists who read the book, the essay is probably more interesting to UN historians or expert journalists seeking information on fundamental trends of the UN system.
The central part of the book, the third chapter, consists of the dictionary in the strict sense of the word, the A to Z entries. Comprising more than 600 pages, it contains about a thousand entries, thoroughly cross-referenced.
The great value of this chapter lies in the broad range of items covered by the entries: not only the large and small UN bodies but also international panels and commissions, world conferences, important UN resolutions, peacekeeping missions, human-rights conventions, legal terms (such as R2P, or Responsibility to Protect), and conflict areas. A range of important UN personalities and, last but not least, a large number of UN-related nongovernmental organizations are also included.
Each entry is informative about the legal mandate, organizational structure and functional history as well as on past and present achievements and problems. Fomerand criticizes structural problems of the UN, emphasizes positive aspects often overlooked by less-informed UN critics and provides a good basis for the reader’s own UN evaluation.
To give an example: In the entry “Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc),” Fomerand criticizes its large workload — “the scope of its agenda has expanded beyond manageable proportions” — but he sees an important benefit of Ecosoc in its subsidiary organs, saying, “ECOSOC has produced useful albeit unheralded work originating . . . from its subsidiary machinery.”
The A-Z entries are a treasure trove of well-structured information on the historical development, the political conditions and the present problems and opportunities of the UN, written in clear, frank language.
The above-mentioned chapters are complemented by a detailed bibliography, providing an overview of relevant UN publications, information sources and secondary literature.
Fomerand’s dictionary is a rich source of information for everybody who is interested in the UN, from the newspaper reader to the student of international politics to the UN expert.
United States Ambassador Nikki Haley with David Beasley, the World Food Program executive director, July 13, 2017. Haley and Beasley are former governors of South Carolina, and Haley nominated Beasley for the UN job in 2017.
A son of David Beasley, the World Food Program executive director, worked briefly this year for the UN agency, but it is not clear what his status was, given original discrepancies. Beasley is a former governor of South Carolina, and the agency’s largest donor is the United States.
Among dozens of names, Beasley is rumored to be a candidate for US ambassador to the UN, succeeding Nikki Haley, who announced this month that she was leaving the job by the end of the year.
Haley had originally nominated Beasley, a fellow ex-governor of South Carolina, for the World Food Program post in 2017, and Beasley has worked for the agency at its base in Rome since March of that year. He has a law degree and was governor of South Carolina from 1995 to 1999, preceding Haley, another Republican.
In September, when reporting for this article began, the LinkedIn page of Beasley’s son Ross said that he had worked as a “Summer Intern,” having spent the month of May in Jordan and Uganda in July. In the LinkedIn page, Ross described his work on “Food distribution and field monitoring” in the “Zaatari and Azraq refugee camps” in Jordan and in “the Karamoja region of Uganda.”
The World Food Program’s human-resources manual says that intern applicants cannot be “sons, daughters, brothers or sisters of WFP employees” to be considered for such a position at the agency.
Gary Karr, the press officer for the World Food Program, said in September that Ross Beasley had not been an intern for the agency but a “volunteer.” After our inquiry with Karr, Ross Beasley changed his LinkedIn page to say he was a “volunteer.”
“The differences between interns and volunteers are significant,” Karr said in an email in September. “WFP posts vacancy announcements to hire interns, and those hired get compensation and a contract. Vacancy announcements are not required for volunteers, who are not compensated and do not get a contract. They can also be children or siblings of WFP employees.”
Karr said in an email that Ross Beasley “received no pay and his airfare and lodging were all paid for with personal funds.” He also cited the wording in the agency’s manual on volunteering: “Any interested person over age 18, including spouses and family of current staff members, may volunteer their services.”
The appearance of Beasley’s son working for a UN agency, regardless of his status, could be perceived as nepotism, given that the elder Beasley is the executive director. Asmiati Malik, a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, recently wrote in The Conversation that studies on nepotism find that it “affects the performance of organisations. However, the lack of research on this topic could potentially mean the impact is far greater than we thought.”
What is difficult, Malik said in a follow-up email, is proving nepotism. He said that it didn’t matter if the son got paid or not but what was important is if he derived a “benefit.” When asked what kind of “benefit” could be achieved, Malik said, “any kind of gain” that doesn’t have to be money. “Open access to one particular job/opportunities also are considered nepotism as it closes others people’s chance.”
He added that the perception of nepotism can have negative implications, but that it depends on the culture of the organization and “how the people inside the organization perceive it.” One World Food Program employee called Beasley’s son working at the agency “demoralizing.”
In an email to a top former official with another large UN agency — peacekeeping — about relatives volunteering for it, the person said, “I don’t know [of] a single case of a senior (or junior) UN official having a close relative volunteering. That’s not to say it didn’t happen but I’m not aware of any. It would have been thru subterfuge if it did happen since it just wouldn’t have been tolerated.”
[This article was updated to include the wording in the World Food Program’s manual on volunteers, per Karr.]
In Cairo last year, Melania Trump toured the Giza Pyramids, a Unesco World Heritage site. The author of the essay toured Unesco sites across five continents, noting how designations can increase tourism to an area but can also hurt a place’s physical integrity. ANDREA HANKS/White House
In the fall — before the caravan, before the firings, before the shutdown, before the wall — Melania Trump concluded her first solo goodwill tour with a photogenic visit to the Great Pyramid and Sphinx of Egypt, the only surviving complex of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
“It was a nice opportunity to see the pyramids in person, which are truly a historical treasure,” explained the American first lady, whose trip was intended to celebrate initiatives financed in Africa by the United States Agency for International Development. “We must always do our best to preserve such important historical sites, and I was so pleased to learn of the work that USAID has done to help with preservation efforts at the base of the Sphinx.”
Melania Trump’s endorsement of international preservation efforts carried particular weight, given the contradictory message telegraphed by her husband’s decision to take the US out of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — Unesco — which administers the World Heritage program.
Thanks to Congress’s refusal to accept the president’s draconian cuts to the Usaid budget, the client regime in Cairo could shore up one of its most celebrated sites. Countries less important to a major donor have to rely more on Unesco for help with their historic sites, though Unesco’s assistance is more about expertise and recognition than money.
The photographs of Melania Trump standing stylish and alone in front of Egypt’s most iconic backdrop — with nary a tourist, much less importunate camel-driver or souvenir seller in sight — seemed made to order for the Egyptian Tourism Authority. Egypt has at last reversed a nearly continuous six-year decline in tourist visits that left it with less than half the number of visitors it enjoyed in 2010.
Egyptians recognize that tourism itself is part of their national heritage. Egypt was the Grand Tour destination for Romans two millennia ago, just as Rome became a mecca for cultured young Englishmen of certain means in the 18thcentury.
The 1960s-era bunker for the North Vietnamese Politburo at the Hanoi citadel. The space was used to plot war strategy against South Vietnam and the United States, Unesco’s expert advisory panel says.
If anything, Italy, with the world’s largest number of cultural World Heritage sites, 49, has today become the poster child for the dangers of global mass tourism, as gigantic cruise ships congest Venice’s canals, tourist hordes decamp around Pisa’s famous tower and mobs jostle aggressively for photogenic position in front of Rome’s Trevi fountain late into the night.
Unesco’s cultural preservationists are appalled. Egyptian tourist authorities are envious. Leaders in most developing countries fantasize about drawing just one percent of Italy’s tourist tide to their shores.
The historic center of Rome and the Giza Pyramids complex would draw millions of tourists a year even without the Unesco logo featured on their visitor brochures. Yet both these and other countries tirelessly pursue listing of new old sites in the hope of bringing travelers’ attention, and presumably dollars, to their less-touristed corners.
In 2018, Unesco’s World Heritage Committee approved 13 new cultural heritage sites, among them the 20th-century industrial city of Ivrea in northern Italy that the committee cited for its 1930s urban planners’ “modern vision of the relationship between industrial production and architecture.” (Who knew?)
At the same time, it also designated, en bloc, the dozen scattered “Hidden Christian sites in the Nagasaki region” in southwest Japan, said to “bear unique testimony to a cultural tradition nurtured by hidden Christians” during two centuries of harsh persecution; and the Thimlich Ohinga dry-stone-walled settlement in Kenya that “served as a fort for communities and livestock, but also defined social entities and relationships linked to lineage.”
The Kenya listing is one illustration of the “global strategy” for world heritage that Unesco adopted in 1994, after 10 years of study and debate, to pursue “the best ways of ensuring the representative nature, and hence the credibility, of the World Heritage List.”
In the two decades after approval of the 1972 World Heritage Convention, listings were overwhelmingly concentrated in Europe. In the quarter-century after adoption of the inclusive global strategy, the number of countries submitting sites for possible World Heritage designation grew from 33 to 183.
Unesco turns to expert panels on monuments for professional evaluation of the “integrity” and “authenticity” of proposed cultural heritage sites and for the adequacy of the management plans the applicant governments submit to ensure sites will be properly maintained. Curiously, the expert panels often express concern about protecting proposed sites against damage from tourism; the governments are usually proposing the sites to lure tourism.
Indeed, the very year that Unesco adopted its global strategy for identifying heritage sites in the developing world, the organization undertook its first joint meeting, on Silk Road tourism in Central Asia, with the World Tourism Organization, which was itself elevated to a full-fledged United Nations specialized agency in 2003, the UNWTO (to distinguish it from the World Trade Organization). Perhaps to the dismay of purists, heritage and tourism have become the yin and yang that yoke the two agencies.
Jebel Barkan in Sudan, one of two Unesco cultural sites in the counry, was a lonely place, the author writes, but “I was excited to see an actual Sudanese visitor exploring the Napatan pyramids.”
Hoping to assay the merits and impact of Unesco recognition, I sought out 40 World Heritage sites across five continents, some natural but mostly cultural, hoping to see whether the partnership between heritage and tourism yielded dividends for countries off the beaten tourist track. Of the dozens of sites I have visited over the years, here are a few sites that reflect how that partnership can work:
• With a single World Heritage listing, Paraguay offers an instructive example. Its territory for a century and a half was the center of a radical experiment in social justice by the Jesuit order, in partnership with and protection of the Guaraní Indians, that Spanish authorities and land-grabbers destroyed in the mid-18thcentury. Paraguay applied for Unesco recognition of its three best preserved Jesuit mission sites, hoping for the same success Argentina has had with visitors to its similar San Ignacio Miní mission on the other side of the Paraná River, 30 kilometers away.
Moreover, with the huge numbers of visitors to the natural World Heritage site of Iguaçu Falls just 250 kilometers away — Brazil reports 1.8 million in 2018, including 100,000 each year from affluent Europe — Paraguayans thought they could register large gains in cultural tourism.
At the urging of its expert monuments panel, however, Unesco dropped one of the three component missions included in Paraguay’s proposal. Its omission provides a controlled experiment between the mission that was rejected, Saints Cosme and Damian, and the other two that were designated as the World Heritage site, Santísima Trinidad and Jesús de Tavarangue. Staff members at the latter shared with me their annual tourist influx: roughly 30,000 visitors a year, concentrated in the winter months (June to September), half of them from outside the continent.
There was no one else wandering the Unesco-listed missions when I visited, though a Japanese family attached to the embassy in Asunción arrived as I was leaving first one and then the other. At Cosme and Damian, the mission site passed over by Unesco, the only other visitors were a Paraguayan family. The one staffer onsite lamented that, for lack of Unesco recognition, total visitors were less than half the numbers at Trinidad and Tavarangue, with prized free-spending foreigners notably absent.
• Another country that boasts only one cultural World Heritage site, Mauritania, has similarly experienced a focused appeal to travelers. Deep in the trackless sands of the western Sahara, is a district of mountains and oases, the Adrar, with four medieval towns that served trans-Saharan caravans, recognized by Unesco for their “remarkably well preserved urban fabric, and houses with patios densely-packed into narrow streets around a mosque with a square minaret.” Chinguetti is perhaps the most notable of the towns, with an Islamic library second only to that of Mali’s more famous Timbuktu.
The minaret of a 13-century mosque in Mauritania.
Recent years’ strife in Mali has occasionally spilled over the border into Mauritania, making the Adrar seem a bit dicey even for the French and Italian touring adventurers who predominate among the visitors to Chinguetti. Direct air service to the region from Paris was suspended after a terrorism scare in 2017, and resumed only a month before my visit last winter, peak season for European visitors. During my two-day stay in Chinguetti, I seemed to be the only foreign visitor in town.
Sidi Khattry and Sylvette Cerisey, co-owners of the one accommodation in town built in traditional ksour (“castle”) architectural style, Gueïla, underscored to me that “the fact that Chinguetti is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list is important for attracting tourists to the region.” But while they credit Unesco’s demands for ensuring government preservation of the authenticity of the site itself, outside its walls “it is deplorable that no rule is in place for the respect of traditional architecture — lots of cement houses even in the old town, and lots of garbage.” The writ of international organizations, it seems, can run only so far.
• I was almost as lonely at Sudan’s two awesome cultural World Heritage sites, centered on ancient pyramids and temples of the Napatan and Meroe complexes, some dating to the eighth century B.C. I was excited to see an actual Sudanese visitor exploring the Napatan pyramids at Jebel Barkal. Foreign travel to Sudan was, admittedly, complicated by longstanding US financial sanctions that excluded the country from the international banking system. Till they were lifted, just weeks after my visit as Barack Obama was leaving the White House, visitors could only use the cash they brought with them.
• While Sudan drew 134,000 visitors in 2017 from Europe and the Americas, Ethiopia, next door, attracted 463,000. With eight Unesco cultural heritage sites — more than any other country in Africa, except Morocco — Ethiopia arguably possesses sub-Saharan Africa’s most varied and monumental sites, from first-century pagan-era obelisks at Aksum (of which Mussolini’s army had taken the largest as war booty to Rome in 1936 and returned by a foot-dragging Italian government in 2005) to 13th-century rock-hewn churches at Lalibela.
Unesco’s expert panels hail the authenticity of Ethiopia’s legendary monuments but warn about inattentive management that endangers the integrity of their preservation. A tour guide in Lalibela, Ermiyas Workye, welcomed the “promotion” among foreign travelers that results from Unesco listing but suggested an even bigger impact lies in the pressure Unesco puts on the government “to preserve the churches by following esthetic value and the churches’ historical sight.”
St. George’s church, hewn from the rock, in Lalibela, Ethiopia.
Politics find their way into the listing process, as a recent visit to Vietnam spotlighted. While sites like Vietnam’s pre-colonial imperial capital at Hué and its quaint 16th-century trading port of Hoi An won speedy Unesco recognition in the 1990s, Vietnam’s application for listing the millennium-old imperial citadel in Hanoi was approved only in 2010.
The experts of the review panel noted that little “authentic” remained at the site: French administrators had demolished the imperial palace and erected a contemporary Western administrative building, in which a bunker was installed in the 1960s for the security of the North Vietnamese Politburo as it plotted war strategy “against South Vietnam and the United States.” The bunker is arguably the most meticulously maintained and officially venerated part of the complex.
The monuments panel acknowledged the site’s “witness” to the unique process of cultural development at the crossroads of Indochina, but charged that its “authenticity” was “confused by the predominant presence of later buildings” and the display on the grounds of US military aircraft captured from the fallen Saigon government.
Despite nearby archaeological excavations that have unearthed significant remains dating to the eighthcentury, the review panel judged the case for listing the citadel site “insufficiently justified” and government plans for site management too vague and general. The government anticipated that with Unesco inscription, the site would generate $1.2 million a year in ticket sales, and it had financial commitments from Japan and France to address concerns about integrity. Impressed by such support, the World Heritage Committee approved designation.
Despite Washington’s on-again, off-again relationship with Unesco, the US has sustained its participation in the agency’s world heritage subsidiary. Eight of the 23 World Heritage sites in the US were approved during the two decades when Washington was a nonmember after 1984.
Still, amid white nationalist charges that World Heritage designation gives foreigners control over American soil, the National Park Service downplays the link and takes pains to assure suspicious Americans that Unesco’s “designations do not affect how Mesa Verde or other World Heritage sites are managed — the United States retains full jurisdiction over these sites and any related management decisions.”
Rather less visible to clamorous sovereigntists is the assistance the US has quietly provided to favored developing countries to promote sustainable tourism, which Usaid unabashedly declares is one of the developing world’s “top five export income-earning categories.”
To be sure, the financial drain on American taxpayers is not huge. The investment in Egypt’s cultural heritage and tourism that so pleased Melania Trump at Giza has amounted to just $12.6 million over three years. White House calls to slash Usaid’s budget have been rebuffed by appropriators of both political parties. It is clear that, by her visit, the first lady aimed to lend her support to the preservationist pushback.
Nikki Haley and the Egyptian ambassador to the UN, Amr Aboulatta, in the Security Council. Haley told Congress recently that Trump’s proposed budget for the UN put the world body “on notice.” RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO
Five months into her stint as United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley faced two days of often-sharp questioning on June 27 and 28 by influential panels of the United States Congress. They demanded justification for the Trump administration’s decision to slash funding to the United Nations, particularly cuts to the UN Population Fund, Unicef, UN Women and the World Food Program.
Concerns were also raised about the wisdom of reducing the US budget contributions to peacekeeping from 27 percent to 25 percent (which cannot be done unilaterally without incurring arrears) and by squeezing peacekeeping missions around the world. Haley was proud to note that funds for the mission in Haiti were being cut by $150 million, though Secretary-General António Guterres just named Josette Sheeran, special envoy on cholera in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Cuts to US contributions to the International Atomic Energy Agency in an era of nuclear proliferations were also questioned.
Haley also proudly told Congressional members that the US got the UN General Assembly budget committee this month to reduce the annual peacekeeping budget. In fact, the US aimed for $1 billion in cuts but agreed to about half that amount, for a total yearly budget of $7.3 billion.
Paradoxically in her testimony in Congress, Haley bemoaned the lack of equipment for peacekeeping troops (the mission in Mali desperately needs armored tanks), which could be financed through a more generous UN budget and save lives.
The tone of questions asked to Haley by Congressional members may suggest that Trump’s 2018 budget will not get significant legislative support on UN-related issues, yet there remains a hard core of Republican legislators who — not always clear on facts or context on how the organization works — are dismissive and insulting. Among them and other groups, a strong pro-Israeli lobby continues to function and may have been strengthened by Trump’s team.
Haley acknowledged pressure from Israel — calling it “support” — that led to the US forcing Guterres, the secretary-general, to reverse the appointment in February of Salam Fayyad, a former Palestinian prime minister, as the UN’s special representative for Libya. Fayyad’s appointment apparently was not initially opposed by Haley. Asked by a member of Congress about the last-minute about-face in the US on Fayyad, Haley said that because Palestine was not recognized as a country by the US, a Palestinian should not be given an official UN post.
In this case, she said, appointing him would add to the UN’s “imbalance” against Israel. She would not say clearly whether Israel forced the change in the original US position or whether a Palestinian could ever be approved for a UN post.
On her first day testifying before Congress, Haley was questioned by a House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee dealing with funds for international organizations; on the second day, she faced the full House committee on foreign affairs. A consummate politician, Haley performed well, skirting some issues, although generally showing unwavering support for the Trump team and the president himself.
“We are on the same page,” Haley said of Trump, who seems to approve of her tough talk in the international arena and his voice at the UN. “I don’t go rogue on the president.”
Yet, she added later that “this administration does not tell me what to say or not to say.”
In an interesting interlude amid the questioning by appropriations committee members, Haley revealed that the most recent threat to Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad and his backers, Russia and Iran, should another Syrian chemical weapons attack occurred, was just a threat by the US, with no action planned.
The goal, she said, was “to send a message” not only to Syria but also to Russia and Iran to get them to “back off.”
On the zeroing out of US funds for Unicef from the proposed 2018 federal budget, about which members on both committees voiced a range of reactions — from disbelief and disappointment to shock and outrage — Haley breezily replied to one questioner that the “starting point” of the budget was to build up the military and look for cuts everywhere else.
She did not react when Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, asked whether the world’s children — through slashing Unicef — should have to pay for the US military buildup, saying it was “not a proud value that Americans would uphold.”
Members of Congress, many of them Democrats shut out of policymaking in a House of Representatives controlled by the Republican party, also wanted to know why the US appeared to have an incoherent foreign policy. They noted conflicting pronouncements in President Trump’s tweets and public flip-flops; measured statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; and declarations by Haley that seemed to be her own opinion at times.
Putting it mildly, the US has become “unpredictable,” a legislator said.
Pressed to describe her relations with her bosses in Washington, Haley revealed to the foreign affairs committee that she rarely talked with Trump or Tillerson and had no information on the unusual number of vacancies in the US State Department. She said that her closest relationship was with the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster; the defense secretary, James Mattis, with whom she spoke on issues concerning the UN; and others in the president’s cabinet, of which she is a member.
“We work as a team,” she said, adding that there was “a very organized process in place.”
On Russia, Haley stuck to her strong objections to the invasion of Crimea and Moscow’s incursions into eastern Ukraine, and accepted that Russia meddled in the 2016 US election. She insisted, however, that Trump was not involved in colluding with the election interference. Asked whether she had discussed with Trump the Russian involvement in the election, possibly at the direction or President Vladimir Putin, Haley said that topic had not come up because it was not a UN matter.
Haley faced many questions on the rationale for the total defunding by the Trump administration of the UN Population Fund, or UNFPA. The most persistent questioners came from Democrats, but they were not alone. Haley responded that there was nothing she could do about the full loss of funds from the US to UNFPA since it had been done by presidential order. She insisted that the money saved, about $70 million by current calculations, would go to similar US aid programs.
Those programs, however, strictly bar US funding for any international organization or NGO that assists or even counsels on abortion. Reflecting her lack of interest about the loss of money to UNFPA, she was asked how maternal health care was being replaced by the UN agency in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, which she just visited. Although she admitted she didn’t know, she said the next day in Congress “I always just meet with women” when she had visited the refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey.
The Trump administration (and the George W. Bush administration) used debunked reports that the Population Fund’s work in China supported forced abortions there to stop financing the agency. Haley repeated the claim, but told the appropriations subcommittee that the UNFPA was “associated” with a “company” in China that was guilty of involuntary “sterilization.” She did not repeat that formulation in the foreign affairs hearings, but Lois Frankel, a Democrat from Florida, called the China reason a “totally phony excuse.”
“A lot of women are going to suffer,” said Ami Bera, a Democrat from California and medical doctor, said about the cuts to the Population Fund.
Much of the hearings were consumed by repeated questions and criticisms of the Human Rights Council. Haley repeated what she said in her confirmation hearing in January about the Council needing to be “fixed.” She has never said plainly that the US is considering withdrawing from the 47-nation body. But in Geneva in June, Haley, saying she had come to see the Council firsthand, made a brief appearance (about three minutes) in the chamber to announce her presence.
Later that day in a speech to the Graduate Institute of Geneva, she warned that the US could “go outside” the Council to protect human rights if two nonnegotiable conditions were not met.
In that speech, Haley demanded that the Council change its election procedures (which would have to be done by the General Assembly) to “keep the worst human rights abusers from obtaining seats on the Council.” That would mean open elections of Council members, who are now chosen regionally by consensus, or horse-trading.
“As it stands, elections for membership to the Council are over before the voting even begins,” she said. “No competition means no scrutiny of candidates’ human rights records. We must change the elections so countries are forced to make the case for membership based on their records, not on their promises.”
Her second demand was that a Council agenda provision — known as Item 7 — which perennially singles out Israel for condemnation, “must be removed.” That command has garnered wide bipartisan support in the US, and American diplomats have been successful in recent years in reducing the number of obsessive resolutions on this issue, which will not be open to debate again until 2020. In Congress, Haley pointed to Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as providing the “hard core support” for Item 7.
Haley had no problem defending Trump’s decision to quit the Paris Agreement on climate change. “We are not going to throw climate out the window,” she said, adding: “What the president did was in the best interest of businesses and the best interest of our country.”
To which Connolly, the representative from Virginia, proclaimed that Trump’s decision put the US in the same boat as Nicaragua and Syria.
Smoking rates in many countries have been dropping while in other countries, prevalence remains flat. In Estonia, above, the rates for men and women are above average compared with other high-income countries. The country has made gains in raising taxes on tobacco, but it has not passed laws to create comprehensive smoke-free spaces. CREATIVE COMMONS
More than half the world’s population — 63 percent — is covered by one or more comprehensive tobacco control measures. In the past 10 years alone, that number has more than doubled, says a new report from the World Health Organization on the “global tobacco epidemic.”
An international push for policies, like strong graphic warnings, a ban on tobacco advertising and smoke-free public spaces, has touched the lives of 4.7 billion people.
Such policies have saved millions of lives, but millions of more people remain in danger, say WHO experts, as tobacco kills seven million people a year. Male smokers living in middle-income countries are by far the largest group of smokers in the world, numbering 765 million, or 68 percent of all smokers.
Around half of the world’s female smokers (85 million) live in high-income countries, and women’s average overall smoking rates have decreased from 8 percent globally in 2007 to 6 percent in 2015.
Men’s average overall smoking rates are declining slowly, from 39 percent globally in 2007 to 35 percent in 2015. The biggest drops are occurring in high-income countries.
“The good news is, tobacco prevalence is going down,” Rosa Sandoval, a regional adviser tobacco control for the WHO, said in an interview. “The bad news is, it is not going down as fast as we would like to see.”
Tobacco advertising is identified as one of the biggest hindrances to progress in use of tobacco. According to the report, major companies “spend tens of billions of US dollars worldwide each year” on promotions to increase sales and boost profits. Health officials say companies use targeted marketing to encourage nonsmokers to start.
The report identifies women and young children in low- and middle-income countries as most vulnerable to these business strategies.
“You might imagine that it would be rare for an adult to be smoking a bubblegum flavored cigarette,” said Dr. Kelly Henning, who leads the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Health program, which includes a nearly $1 billion campaign to curb the tobacco epidemic in low- and middle-income countries. “That product is almost surely targeted towards children and young adults to get more and more of those age groups hooked on tobacco.”
Sandoval said that WHO hoped to see the prevalence of tobacco drop 30 percent from 2010 to 2025. However, prevalence is currently decreasing at a rate of only 4 percent every five years, so the goal is far out of reach. That is not to say that countries have done a poor job fighting what advocates call the tobacco epidemic so far.
The report defines tobacco as cigarettes and other forms of smoked tobacco (e.g. cigars, pipe, bidis, water pipes); and smokeless tobacco products, such as chewing tobacco and snuff.
According to the report, the MPOWER initiative, a WHO program to reduce tobacco demand, has not only saved millions of lives but also hundreds of billions of dollars since it began in 2008. MPOWER works on six strategies: “Monitor tobacco use and prevention policies; protect people from tobacco smoke; offer help to quit tobacco use; warn people about the dangers of tobacco; enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; and raise taxes on tobacco.”
The report notes that eight countries have fully implemented at least four of the MPOWER measures: Brazil, Britain, Iran, Ireland, Madagascar, Malta, Panama and Turkey. Five of the countries are classified as low- or middle-income. Sandoval said these gains have showed a key advantage of the MPOWER’s ability in fighting the influence of tobacco companies. But 57 countries have yet to adopt a single MPOWER measure.
“The good news is, you do not need to be a rich country to implement these policies,” Sandoval said. “In the new WHO report, you will see how low- and middle-income countries have implemented successful policies to curb the tobacco epidemic in the region of the Americas.”
In the United States, for example, cigarette smoking has dropped to historic lows, yet tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the country, killing more than 480,000 people a year. The Food and Drug Administration recently announced a new program to tackle the addictive nature of tobacco through tighter regulation of nicotine.
Sandoval deals specifically with the Americas in her work, but the report shows that its findings apply globally as well. In addition to MPOWER’s success, Sandoval said that 18 countries have banned smoking entirely in public places and workspaces. She said that this policy not only discouraged current smokers but also potential smokers.
“It communicates a strong message to society that this is a product that harms your health, so if you want to smoke it, you have to do it outside,” she said. “You cannot expose other people to secondhand smoke.”
Sandoval said that tobacco taxes have proven to be the most cost-effective measure under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to cut consumption and encourage users to quit. Nevertheless, the report demonstrates that taxes are the tool least adopted by UN member states.
One problem the report identifies is that “tobacco excise tax structures in many countries are quite complex, with different (tiered) taxes that are applied to the same product based on sometimes minor differences in product characteristics. Tobacco companies take whatever actions they can to keep taxes low.”
The report recommends a single, specific high tax on all tobacco products that adjusts with the economy’s growth. Tobacco taxes, it says, are especially important because increased government revenues can be used to finance treatment and prevention of noncommunicable diseases nationally.
The report says that tobacco is a “leading common risk factor” for noncommunicable diseases, which are responsible for around 70 percent of deaths globally each year.
For most low- and middle-income countries, however, a uniform tobacco tax is a distant reality. The report says that only 11 countries, or 8 percent of low- and middle-income countries, levy taxes at rates in accordance with WHO recommendations. Sandoval said these countries also suffer socially and economically because of the structure of the tobacco industry.
“Many of the children that are part of families growing tobacco are working and studying at the same time, and a high percentage of these children are not going to school,” Sandoval said.
If children are focusing less on school and more on work, she said their families and their countries alike suffer in the long run. She also stressed the link between tobacco-production and poverty.
“This is a product that is associated [with] diseases that require large budgets to be cured or to be taken care of, and usually people live with these diseases or conditions for a long time,” she said. “So, this is a distress not only on the families but also the public budget in the health sector.”
Financing of UN organizations is erratic and distorted, the authors argue, so they recommend an independent commission to better manage the situation. Two such organizations, the UN Environment Program and Unesco, operate the Great Apes Survival Partnership, which aims to thwart the extinction of gorillas and other apes in equatorial Africa and southeast Asia.
GENEVA — Change is in the air again on First Avenue. Among numerous reform options being bandied about, none will be more consequential than those on financing the United Nations system.
There are the sledgehammer arguments: drastic slashes in funding by Washington and other donors could precipitate dramatic change. As we have argued in these pages, however, such cuts could also help focus the UN’s collective mind, demanding that the system’s development and humanitarian organizations achieve more with less. That would also require asking tough questions about comparative advantages and cutting superfluous activities to be accomplished more effectively outside the UN system.
However, it is as much the patterns as overall levels of funding that already seriously undermine the system’s potential. In a new study published by Sweden’s expert group for aid studies, we highlight two major problems arising from the financing of the UN funds and programs: haphazard patterns of funding; and distortions from the growing preponderance of earmarked funding.
Financing practices in the UN reflect history and expediency. Member states created the 13 funds and programs over seven decades, starting with Unicef in 1946 and ending with UN Women in 2010. The growth has responded to perceived development and humanitarian needs, although no blueprint could have anticipated the system’s size and shape. Moreover, there has been no attempt to raise and allocate resources rationally to reflect the nature of the varying mandates or each organization’s relevance and effectiveness.
The “big four” funds and programs — Unicef, World Food Program, UN Development Program and UN Refugee Agency — are still “voluntary,” requiring nonstop fund-raising campaigns, mostly from wealthy member states. Annual budgeting, subject to the vagaries of official development aid, is hardly a recipe for sustained capacity development. The only exception to the 100-percent voluntary budgets is a trivial allocation to the UN refugee agency from the UN’s assessed biennial budget.
For the smaller organizations, contributions from the UN’s core budget — subscribed by every UN member state — vary from some 30 percent for the UN Environmental Program and UN Conference on Trade and Development to much less than 10 percent despite one of the most far-reaching mandates of any UN body, encompassing drug control, international crime, trafficking and corruption.
With zero or negative growth in the UN’s core budget, the exact amounts reflect the ability of each organization to lobby before internal budget committees. There are no criteria of performance, no objective impact assessments and no evaluation of continuing relevance. For example, although global trade negotiations have migrated from the UN to the World Trade Organization, there has been no diminution in assessed budget allocations to the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
Core funding for the funds and programs, whether the paltry amounts from the assessed budget or from voluntary contributions, has stagnated or declined, particularly in this century. All such UN bodies have thus come to rely on voluntary “noncore” contributions, which donors restrict to countries and themes of special interest to them.
UN organizations resemble various-size dogs. Whether large or small, they are being wagged by growing tails. In addition to bilateral donors, other multilateral organizations — especially the world’s largest donor, the European Commission — and the large specialized vertical funds in the health and environment fields are also major contributors.
The result is the loss of direct control, turning UN funds and programs into implementers of donor priorities. UN organizations are diverted into managing and reporting on numerous projects for each patron, spreading core staff resources thinly while donors press for reduced overheads. The competitive chase after noncore resources also worsens an already atomized UN family, resulting in more overlap, duplication and competition for turf.
Can anything be done?
Donors should be encouraged to increase their core contributions and support pooled resources into multiagency funds. Noncore or earmarked funding should be channeled into areas in which the UN has an acknowledged comparative advantage: in norm and standard-setting and global conventions (like the Paris climate agreement in 2015). Such tied funding should reinforce mandates and avoid duplication.
This recommendation particularly applies to the UN Development Program, whose responsibilities as coordinator for the UN development system conflict with its growing panoply of operational activities in competition with other organizations.
Funds and programmes should justify their use of core resources and overheads. They should also be prepared to “say no” to offers of noncore funding, however financially tempting, that fall outside their core mandates and often entail distracting and onerous conditions.
The report recommends creating an independent funding commission. The starting point is to standardize definitions and nomenclature — accurate statistics simply do not exist. The commission would also identify the areas where the activities of the funds and programs overlap and recommend rationalizations and mergers.
This autonomous effort — outside the UN secretariat’s control — would be an essential building block for the “funding compact” that Secretary-General António Guterres proposed to the Economic and Social Council in July to make the system more capable of supporting the 2030 Agenda.
David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program, visiting Sanaa, Yemen, where the world’s worst hunger crisis has been unfolding for at least a year. MARCO FRATTINI/WFP
David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, based in Rome, posted a prayer at the top of his Twitter page in early January, reading: “My prayer for 2018: Peace. Our path to Zero Hunger begins with peace.”
The page, @dbeasley1, is a hybrid of personal tweets and professional news about his work at the United Nations agency. His descriptor reads: “Married to Mary Wood. Four children. Follower of Jesus. Executive Director of the World Food Programme.” In the background of his photo is an image of the UN flag.
He has another Twitter account, @WFPChief, which is strictly professional and appears to have no references to religion. On his new Facebook page, Beasley injects his professional activities with news about his personal life, like a family trip to Venice.
A governor of South Carolina from 1995 to 1999, Beasley was nominated for the UN post by another ex-governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, who likes to combine feel-good sayings with information about her Saturday night outings and meetings with foreign ministers on her Twitter page.
Haley is the United States envoy to the UN and a member of the Trump cabinet. In a letter she sent in February 2017 to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, obtained by PassBlue, she recommended Beasley for the UN position, signing the letter, “God bless.”
Given that Beasley now runs the world’s largest humanitarian-aid agency, how appropriate is it for him to declare his religious beliefs so openly? Some experts on the UN and those inside the organization who were interviewed for this article said they were uncomfortable by his doing so, while others thought he needed to just be more discreet.
“I’d say that it really does make people uneasy,” said Jean Krasno, director of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York. The religious affiliation of, say, UN secretaries-general has been clear, Krasno added, but “it was never implied that it would influence their policies.”
The extent of Beasley’s “follower of Jesus” beliefs influencing policy at the World Food Program is hard to gauge, but as soft power it could be subtle. The agency serves 75 countries and is financed entirely through donations, with the US being the biggest donor.
“Religious parochialism could interfere with the UN’s primary mission of providing food aid,” said Ruth Wedgwood, who chairs the international law program at Johns Hopkins University. “The millions of people represented at the United Nations include many cultures and many states. It could be seen as parochial and exclusionary to focus on one religion while excluding others. The moral vocation of feeding the hungry remains essential regardless of the religious choices of persons in need. ”
Beasley is operating with a five-year strategy that was adopted by the agency’s board before he came to Rome, so that has not changed. Yet the fact that he is declaring his religious faith in such a public way, Krasno said, suggests he is proselytizing.
“It’s completely inappropriate,” said Krasno, who is organizing the papers of former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “Doing so flies in the face of UN norms.”
Personally stating one’s religious credo expresses a “bias” that “verges on the unethical,” Krasno added, “especially as religious tensions run high across the world.”
The religious declaration doesn’t stop with Beasley at the agency. His communications adviser, Gary Karr, says on his Twitter page that he, too, is a “follower of Jesus.” He also writes: “. . . husband, Dad, Comms adviser to @WFPChief. PR Pro focused on quotes, messages, stories in traditional and digital media. Very artisanal.” Karr was Beasley’s press adviser when he was governor of South Carolina.
Karr responded to PassBlue’s request for comment about Beasley’s Twitter page by saying that the @davidbeasly1 account is his “personal Twitter bio” and that Karr’s is “personal and not official” as well.
“On the Executive Director’s personal Twitter bio, it is not a reference to a religion, but a reference that he tries to follow the teachings of Jesus,” Karr added. “He has said for decades, in speeches all over the world and to varying audiences, that whether one sees Jesus as a man, a prophet or a savior, the teachings of ‘love your neighbour’ transcends all religions and cultures. . . . Also, Executive Director Beasley has for decades promoted respect for people of all faiths or of no faith.”
One person who works for the World Food Program and asked to remain anonymous, expressed concern to PassBlue about Beasley’s religious references and “what seems to be a conservative, economic-focussed agenda, where the principles and values upon which the UN was founded are not being heard or felt.”
In Beasley’s holiday message to the World Food Program staff, he said: “The ancient scriptures teach us to love one another. As we reflect on this during the holiday season, I thank you for being a part of the World Food Program family which shares this love and kindness with the hungry and the vulnerable.”
Jeffrey Laurenti, a long-time UN analyst with UNA-USA and the Century Foundation, said that the Christian declaration of Beasley could benefit the UN.
“I would hope he would know where he must draw the line on expressing personal sectarian convictions in order to work successfully with everyone on the global stage,” Laurenti said. “Jesus Christ could appropriately be his inspiration for doing this work, and certainly not a matter of reproach. Indeed, anything that ties conservative religious constituencies in the United States to the work of the UN could help secure the survival of the UN in domestic American politics.”
But bringing “Jesus as his ‘personal savior’ into the boardroom [of WFP],” Laurenti added, “would be a huge problem because even most Christians internationally don’t express their faith in that very Southern evangelical way — and four-fifths of the world do not profess Christianity at all.”
Beasley had no experience running an international food-aid agency when Guterres picked him for the UN position, though he had led trade missions overseas as governor. His appointment last year to the UN “alarmed some diplomats and good governance advocates,” Colum Lynch of Foreign Policy wrote at the time, because of Beasley’s inexperience and the push by Haley for Guterres to choose Beasley in a field of more experienced candidates.
Nevertheless, Beasley arrived in Rome in April 2017 as the world contended with four famine threats, which have been averted for now: in northern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, all conditions related to war and drought. “It’s been like drinking water out of a fire hydrant,” Beasley said in an interview when he first took the UN job.
The agency was conceived in 1961, when George McGovern, as director of the US Food for Peace Program, proposed a multilateral aid program providing “shared relief,” as Laurenti put it, for the hungry overseas and for US and other Western farmers to unburden their surplus crops. Its first executive director was Dutch, Addeke Boerma, and its maiden food drop occurred in northern Iran, after it was struck by an earthquake: 1,500 metric tons of wheat, 270 tons of sugar and 27 tons of tea were sent to survivors.
Besides delivering food, the agency has evolved to giving cash and coupons to feed people while enhancing local economies. Catherine Bertini became the first American — and woman — to head the agency in 1992, leading the way for US takeover of the executive director’s office since then. As of Jan. 15, 2018, the US had donated $2.5 billion to the agency; the other top donors are the European Union, at $1.2 billion, and Germany, $925 million. In November, Beasley told the agency’s board that the US contribution did not drop, despite such possibilities under the Trump administration, because of strong support for the agency in Congress.
During his term as South Carolina governor, Beasley proclaimed his Christian faith publicly, which Haley did as well in that role. Beasley had originally been a Democrat but switched to the Republican Party in 1991, saying that the Democrats’ policies were bad for families and for America.
He lost his second run for the governorship partly because he had recommended moving the Confederate flag from the State House dome. (It was moved elsewhere on the grounds and permanently removed by Haley in 2015.) After he left the governor’s office, Beasley received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2003 for his flag-moving recommendation.
In 2005, Beasley founded the Center for Global Strategies with Henry Deneen, a South Carolinian who was Beasley’s chief legal counsel when he was governor. The center, its website says, is a “nonprofit organization connecting businesspeople to international initiatives.”
The website promotes the work of a crisis-pregnancy organization in Macedonia, called A Beating Heart. It is described as the “first and only pro-life crisis pregnancy center in Macedonia” that is “dedicated to counseling and helping women while promoting the value of life and the baby’s right to be born.”
The roots of Christian-professed leaders running the UN food agencies hark back in recent times to Tony Hall, an American politician who has had an illustrious career fighting global hunger, having been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize several times. For advice at the World Food Program, Beasley has turned to Hall, who is also a former Democratic congressman from Ohio and was the US ambassador to the UN agencies in Rome under President George W. Bush.
Hall and Beasley got to know each other working on the annual Washington-based National Prayer Breakfast and are close friends. The breakfast is connected to the Fellowship Foundation, a national group well documented for its influential political members and secretive meetings. Its mission is to, in brief, “adhere to the teachings and precepts of Jesus.”
Another member of Beasley’s inner circle at the World Food Program is also a protégé of Hall: David Austin worked for him when he ran the Rome agencies; Austin, too, is a member of the Fellowship Foundation, a connection that also makes some World Food Program staff members queasy.
Throughout Beasley’s political career, he fit the Republican ideal of shrinking government. When he was governor, he made “Putting Families First” the theme of his administration as it returned “power to the taxpayers,” so much so that he bragged that the “average homeowner in South Carolina pays no school operating taxes” while he also drastically cut welfare in the state.
Beasley has obviously taken a quantum leap from South Carolina politics to ending world hunger, and he may be the first to admit how complicated that goal is when trying to influence world leaders, as he referred to attendees at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he was interviewed.
“If we can end the conflicts, we can end world hunger,” he said, without mentioning specific crises, like Yemen. That war, led by Saudi Arabia and aided and abetted by the US, is edging into its fourth year, brimming with human catastrophes.
But the US — Nikki Haley — and others on the UN Security Council have been steering the war off the Council agenda. If Beasley knew why the Council remains so passive about the conflict and its toll on Yemenis, he didn’t dare say.
The UN Women agency is considering the use of blockchain technology to assist women and girls in crises like natural disasters. Karen Ellemann, a Danish government minister, above, addressing a simulation lab of blockchain use at the UN recently. RYAN BROWN/UN WOMEN
Blockchain technology emerged alongside Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency powering digital payments through a peer-to-peer system, currency trading and even, in some cases, black-market transactions. Now, some United Nations agencies are using blockchain to provide basic identification to refugees and others in developing countries as well as for specific actions like helping refugees obtain food rations in UN camps. More broadly, the use of blockchain could improve the efficiency of UN agencies, satisfying donors along the way.
As the name suggests, a blockchain is a series of blocks of information containing anything from financial transactions to personal identities. They can also store things like health care information or votes. The entries are strung together as they occur, so that each piece of information links to the ones before and after it. In addition, everyone on the blockchain has a copy of every transaction, therefore helping to prevent fraudulent changes to any singular block.
Blockchains are considered advantageous because they are decentralized. In a traditional ledger, an entity must moderate the transaction. For example, when you wire money to a person or other source, it must go through a bank or an institutional means before it reaches the recipient. But on a blockchain, middlemen are cut out, making transactions more efficient and accurate. Banks such as JPMorgan Chase are developing private blockchains to improve internal operations.
Yet because Bitcoin works on a blockchain, no bank can moderate transactions, and crimes like human trafficking and money laundering become harder to track. Users who engage in transactions on a blockchain create a code — a long number key that serves as their digital signature. If criminals are careless and reveal their key, their identity — and criminal history — are readily available for investigators. Researchers and law enforcement agencies are also figuring out ways to track the IP address of the buyer or seller to a specific computer and location.
Despite the dominant incarnation of its current use, blockchain technology can be used to promote social good, its proponents say. According to the World Bank, approximately 1.1 billion people cannot prove their identity for a wide range of reasons, leaving them stateless and powerless. This problem disproportionately affects women and children in developing countries in Africa and Asia.
Atefeh Riazi, the UN assistant secretary-general and chief information technology officer, is no stranger to blockchain technology. Speaking to humanitarians and students at the Institute for Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University last year, Riazi highlighted how a lack of identity hinders human rights.
“What are the implications when you don’t know how old you are?” Riazi said to the audience. “You can be drafted to military as a kid, you can be tried as an adult when you’re a child, you could be trafficked and nobody cares, nobody knows who you are. You could get married at age 9 or 10, when people think — or want to think — you’re 15. And most of the people impacted by lack of identity are girls and women.”
Some policymakers and innovators see blockchain technology as a way to solve such problems. ID2020 Alliance is a nonprofit organization financed by Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation that brings together public and private sectors to create legal identities for people who lack them. At ID2020’s second annual conference, held at the UN last June, attendees talked of using blockchain and biometric technologies to give everyone in the world an identity. This includes “the last girl” — the person in the world whose situation is so bleak that the chances of her getting a legal identity are nearly impossible.
At the conference, Microsoft and Accenture unveiled a new tool that combines blockchain and biometric data, such as retina scans and fingerprints, to give people access to their identity records anywhere, anytime. One major recipient of this technology would be refugees, who could gain access to their passport and other documents, even if the hard copies were destroyed or lost. Although the tool has yet to be deployed, refugees are already benefiting from blockchain technology.
The World Food Program, for example, started piloting “Building Blocks” last year. Up to 10,000 Syrian refugees in the Azraq camp in Jordan pay for their food using entitlements recorded on a blockchain system. Instead of using cash, vouchers or cards, refugees buy food using a retina scan. The system relies on biometric data registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The program was scheduled to end on May 31, 2017, but has been extended indefinitely.
“Digital cash and blockchain allow refugees to buy locally, helping them and the local economy,” Riazi said at the Fordham program. “It puts us in a different position by making us a catalyst. Blockchain can allow refugees to easily retrieve all their information such as their passport, birth certificate, diplomas, and other critical documents.”
Blockchain, she added, “will have a tremendous impact on our economy, financial markets, supply chain and identity while helping to reduce fraud and laundering.”
Blockchain technology’s uses are just beginning to be explored by other UN agencies. UN Women recently announced its own pilot program for cash transfers and identity powered by blockchain, directed toward women and girls in humanitarian-crisis settings, like natural disasters and wars.
As Yannick Glemarec, deputy executive director of UN Women, said at the agency’s announcement on blockchain technology, “Digital technologies can provide unprecedented solutions to address the fundamental needs of marginalized groups and those at the bottom of the pyramid.”
On April 29, 2018, the 15 members of the UN Security Council visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh that houses 600,000 people. Here, Karen Pierce, the British ambassador, hugs a resident of the camp while Lise Gregoire-van Haaren, the deputy ambassador of Netherlands, is behind her. CAROLINE GLUCK/UN PHOTO
To provide readers who want information about the United Nations that is intelligent and concise yet comprehensive is a challenging task for every author: he or she must outline a puzzling system of principal organs, specialized agencies, programs, funds, commissions and committees that produces large piles of resolutions, declarations and conventions on topics such as peacekeeping, development assistance, global health, migration, environmental protection and human rights.
To provide a useful orientation in the seemingly chaotic UN system calls for somebody who has worked extensively inside it but who has also studied and analyzed it thoroughly from the outside: the author of such a book is Jacques Fomerand, a French political scientist and former UN official, who has done both. From 1977 till 1991, he worked in the UN Secretariat, and from 1992 to 2003, he was director of the New York office of the United Nations University. Retiring in 2003, he has been teaching in academic institutions in the United States and France.
Fomerand’s book, the second edition of the “Historical Dictionary of the United Nations,” published by Scarecrow Press in December 2017 (the first was published in 2007), contains more than 840 pages of updated information about the UN.
Why is the book titled “Historical Dictionary”? It contains both a historical analysis of the UN as well as a dictionary with entries from A to Z.
The initial chapters are dedicated to the history the UN: the first chapter consists of a detailed chronology, mapping out the expansion and differentiation of the organizational structures of the UN and the tasks of its organs. The chronology makes plain the abundance of tasks the world organization is dealing with: you can take any year you like and you will find a multitude of international conventions adopted by the General Assembly, numerous Security Council decisions on peacekeeping matters and human-rights violations as well as world conferences on global problems held by specialized agencies of the UN.
The densely packed schedule of meetings of the different UN bodies demonstrates impressively the broad range of UN activities and the necessity to tackle many global problems promptly and efficiently.
While the chronology provides an informative overview on UN activities, the second chapter, an “introduction,” weighs the achievements and failures of the UN in its main fields of work. Fomerand has written it in the form of a long essay of about 60 pages in elegant English.
It outlines the institutional developments of the UN in reaction to the changing system of international relations and relates the scope of UN activities explicitly to the national interests of its member states, saying, “The United Nations is rarely more than the sum of its parts, and generally it mirrors the divisions as well as the hopes and convictions of the world’s governments.”
While the chronology addresses apparently students and journalists who read the book, the essay is probably more interesting to UN historians or expert journalists seeking information on fundamental trends of the UN system.
The central part of the book, the third chapter, consists of the dictionary in the strict sense of the word, the A to Z entries. Comprising more than 600 pages, it contains about a thousand entries, thoroughly cross-referenced.
The great value of this chapter lies in the broad range of items covered by the entries: not only the large and small UN bodies but also international panels and commissions, world conferences, important UN resolutions, peacekeeping missions, human-rights conventions, legal terms (such as R2P, or Responsibility to Protect), and conflict areas. A range of important UN personalities and, last but not least, a large number of UN-related nongovernmental organizations are also included.
Each entry is informative about the legal mandate, organizational structure and functional history as well as on past and present achievements and problems. Fomerand criticizes structural problems of the UN, emphasizes positive aspects often overlooked by less-informed UN critics and provides a good basis for the reader’s own UN evaluation.
To give an example: In the entry “Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc),” Fomerand criticizes its large workload — “the scope of its agenda has expanded beyond manageable proportions” — but he sees an important benefit of Ecosoc in its subsidiary organs, saying, “ECOSOC has produced useful albeit unheralded work originating . . . from its subsidiary machinery.”
The A-Z entries are a treasure trove of well-structured information on the historical development, the political conditions and the present problems and opportunities of the UN, written in clear, frank language.
The above-mentioned chapters are complemented by a detailed bibliography, providing an overview of relevant UN publications, information sources and secondary literature.
Fomerand’s dictionary is a rich source of information for everybody who is interested in the UN, from the newspaper reader to the student of international politics to the UN expert.
A wave of new or persistent accusations of harassment and corruption in some UN system agencies and programs reflects poor management and more politicization of high-level appointments demanded by UN member nations. Here, the UN headquarters.
A sea of new or lingering allegations of harassment and corruption in numerous agencies and programs in the United Nations system appears to be washing over a sprawling organization battered by scandal. Poor or careless management and oversight, from top to bottom, is partly to blame, but so is persistent, overt politicization of high-level appointments demanded by member nations, according to current and former staff members and analysts of the UN.
In recent years, numerous components of the UN system have been rattled by spotlights turned on them from human-rights groups, anticorruption organizations, #MeToo accusers and whistleblowers. Responses from top officials in the agencies and at UN headquarters have been at best uneven.
High-profile agencies have been scrutinized, such as Unicef, the UN Environment Program, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (Unaids). The latter unites the work of 10 UN agencies and the World Bank.
On a smaller scale, targets of insider whistleblowers and critics outside the UN have included some relatively obscure entities, such as the International Civil Service Commission (an independent body in name only), whose chairman retired with his pension last year despite unresolved harassment allegations.
Similarly, at the International Fund for Agricultural Development, its president is asking his board to withdraw the fund from an International Labor Organization administrative tribunal to protect errant IFAD officials, including sexual harassers.
Corruption and abuse of authority in the UN are not new, but until recent years these practices that defy rules and scorn ethical considerations have not been so widely exposed at the level of public scrutiny now seeping through the system. Many allegations involve financial improprieties, management inaction or sexual assault — or sometimes all the infractions wrapped in a single case.
One UN official who wanted to remain nameless called the problems “endemic” and getting worse.
When the underlying factor of a controversial political appointment kicks in, usually for a prestigious and career-building job demanded by a UN member government or regional group, capable international civil servants suffer. They talk of being forced to work under the imposed and often unqualified overlord who may have neither experience in the field nor respect for UN rules.
Stephen Browne, author of the forthcoming book “UN Reform: Past, Present and Future,” has been a UN Development Program representative in Africa and a development official at the agency’s headquarters in New York. Brown is co-director with Thomas G. Weiss of the FutureUN.org project at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Browne also lectures on UN affairs at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
He has watched the evolution of the UN for years and criticizes current trends in its management, particularly in human resources.
“I can only regret the growing, not diminishing politicization of UN appointments,” Browne said in an email. “Such an irony after we finally saw a merit-based selection process for the secretary-general [António Guterres].”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, and Kingston Rhodes, chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, April 13, 2017. Rhodes retired weeks early from his job in December 2018, after allegations that he had instilled a hostile workplace for women in the UN agency.
Apprehensions are heard in many places in the UN system about the powerful role of the deputy secretary-general, Amina Mohammed of Nigeria, to whom Guterres has ceded main control and reform of the UN’s development structure and agenda, including the Sustainable Development Goals — Agenda 2030. New policies and decisions are affecting numerous relevant agencies, officials say.
Peacekeeping, often the focus of the most visible or widely reported condemnations of the UN, is a separate situation because its troops are commanded by national militaries who often don’t take human-rights guidelines seriously or don’t punish offenders, which is their prerogative. The relevant departments in the UN Secretariat governing peace and security do have responsibilities, however.
This article does not include peacekeeping, which was the focus of an extraordinarily definitive investigation led by a Canadian Supreme Court justice, Marie Deschamps, in 2015, after charges of sexual abuse involving peacekeepers in the Central African Republic. The report found the UN system “flawed” and dysfunctional.
The problems plaguing Unaids
Unaids provides an exemplary case of multifaceted mismanagement in dealing with abuses that included sexual assault, administrative denials, intimidation and retribution when complainants go public.
Accusations of harassment have been emerging in the agency for more than three years. In January 2018, an external-relations officer, Martina Brostrom, went public with her story of how she had been sexually assaulted in Bangkok in 2015 by a high-ranking Unaids official.
The accused official, Luiz Loures, then deputy director for programs at the agency, denied the allegations. After an internal investigation, the case was dismissed, though Loures left the agency in March 2018, choosing not to seek a renewal of his appointment.
The extensive details of the decision rendered in the case against Loures, who claimed exoneration, were elaborated in an article in the British medical journal The Lancet in April that year.
In the wake of the Unaids decision to dismiss the case, Paula Donovan, co-director with the Canadian diplomat Stephen Lewis of AIDS-Free World, and the Code Blue campaign against impunity for sexual misconduct in the UN, wrote to Guterres last year, questioning the role of the executive director of Unaids, Michel Sidibé of Mali. He had formally closed the case, despite having recused himself earlier. Donovan and Lewis asked Guterres to review Sidibe’s involvement.
“Mr. Secretary-General, you are confronted by a gross miscarriage of justice,” they wrote. . . . “It is one of the wretched ironies of this case that the investigators found it necessary, in four of the eleven paragraphs summarizing their findings, to state how perplexed they were by the words and actions of Mr. Sidibé.
“Why do we feel compelled to come forward in this way?” the letter asked. “Because, Mr. Secretary-General, we are called upon to do so. There is such fear throughout the UN system over possible job loss and retaliation that most women who are victimized, and staff who object to the treatment of those who do come forward, are driven into silence. Indeed, the case at hand is a textbook example of aggressive retaliation.
“Every other institution called to account through the movement sparked by #MeToo is rushing to give survivors the benefit of the doubt; only in the United Nations are the victims hounded into resignation and despair,” the authors said.
On Dec. 13, 2018, after a second, more thorough outside investigation, the Report of the Independent Expert Panel on Prevention of and Response to Harassment, Including Sexual Harassment, Bullying and Abuse of Power at UNAIDS Secretariat described the agency as a “toxic working environment.”
It said that only the departure of the executive director could fix it, and Sidibé announced he would leave his post six months early, in June 2019. Advocates for victims say that is not soon enough.
Media in Europe have reported that donors — notably Sweden, second to the United States in funding Unaids — and other countries had suspended or were considering blocking release of their contributions.
According to The Associated Press, the case has been taken out of the hands of the World Health Organization, which oversees Unaids, and sent for review by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services in New York.
The story is far from over for Martina Brostrom, a Swede.
On April 15 of this year, The Associated Press reported from Geneva that Brostrom herself is now the subject of an apparently ongoing investigation into her possible involvement in misuse of funds by her former supervisor, with whom she had a personal relationship. The couple was alleged to have used UN rates and money at hotels for trysts, and in one case apparently asked for invoices showing that their stay was business related. Both are now on leave from Unaids.
At AIDS-Free World, Paula Donovan said in an interview on April 17, 2019, that she sees this previously unknown investigation as retribution against Brostrom. Donovan added that she always believed that the accusations Brostrom leveled at Luiz Loures were credible. He had developed a reputation as a predator; at least two other employees of the agency have reported being harassed by him. He also denies those accusations.
Harassment at Unicef
At Unicef, a case in 2018 involved past conduct of a newly appointed official, Justin Forsyth of Britain, who resigned in February as deputy executive director after staff members complained that he had been given a top job at the children’s agency despite his reputation for inappropriate behavior with women at Save the Children, his previous employer.
Henrietta Fore, the American development expert who had just become Unicef’s executive director on Jan. 1, 2018, quickly issued new measures after the Forsyth debacle “to prevent, report and respond to all forms of harassment in the workplace — including abuse of power.”
Among the measures were “Improving staff vetting and screening for new hires — including professional, background and criminal-record checks. In addition, a specialized UN reference-check facility is being established, and UNICEF will be part of it.”
Fore also announced that she was forming a task force of advisers from both UN and outside women’s organizations as well as the private sector to review Unicef policies.
The Unicef case, among others, points to the growing influence of staff members at agencies, when they organize to confront leadership and garner public support.
Erik Solheim, the former head of the UN Environment Program, was forced to resign by the UN secretary-general, after a media report revealed Solheim’s misuse of funds and other corruption.
Excesses at the UN Environment Program
As for the UN Environment Program, the reaction to criticism of excessive and expensive international travel by the executive director, Erik Solheim, a Norwegian, was by UN standards fairly prompt and decisive. According to exclusive reporting by the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, and his colleagues, there had been criticisms of his tenure for months from staff members inside Unep and major donor governments.
But when audit findings began to leak in September 2018, showing the magnitude of Solheim’s misuse of funds — for example, spending nearly half a million dollars in air travel and hotels in 22 months — and being absent from Unep’s base in Nairobi 80 percent of the time, his tenure was no longer tenable, the Guardian reported. Secretary-General Guterres asked Solheim to resign, which he did in November.
With $50 million in donor support at stake, Carrington wrote, “The audit said this was a ‘reputation risk’ for an organization dedicated to fighting climate change.”
The Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden were among the countries that said publicly they had stopped donating to Unep until the problem was resolved. The Guardian also said the US was concerned about Solheim’s involvement with China on environmental projects along the Chinese Belt and Road initiative connecting East Asia to the West.
Unctad, as the organization is known, is based in Geneva and was a creation and great hope of newly independent nations that emerged after the end of colonialism, most notably in Africa and Asia. It was founded in 1964, with the newly forming G-77 nations plus China at its core, with help from developed nations. (The G77 now numbers 134 members, plus China, and as a caucus commands a solid majority in the UN General Assembly.)
Reflecting the spirit of anticolonial movements, Unctad was a leftist-progressive body, but its early leadership was comprised of some well-known less-ideological economists. Its role was to be a think tank for developing countries, providing technical support and analysis, a current UN official stressed in an interview. Its first secretary-general was Raul Prebisch.
Prebisch was a stellar analyst and thinker on international trade who had also established Argentina’s central bank and statistics office. Seeing the industrialized nations pull ahead in productivity and thus enjoy ever-greater advantages in trade, he promoted structural economic change as well as industrial growth and expansion in developing countries.
Fast forward to Unctad’s current and seventh secretary-general, Mukhisa Kituyi of Kenya, a former member of parliament and trade minister under President Mwai Kibaki. Kituyi was nominated for the Unctad position, African media reports say, not by the full regional group but by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, with whom he had some investment discussions in the past. African nations, acting in solidarity, went along with Kituyi’s nomination. He took office at Unctad in 2013 and was elected to a second four-year term in 2017.
Rumblings of allegations of harassment, misuse of UN funds and corruption have emerged in Unctad. Oddly, it is paired with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime as stewards of Sustainable Development Goal 16.4.1, which covers monitoring “Total value of inward and outward illicit financial flows.”
Almost from the start of his appointment, Kituyi has been criticized by his own staff members, who have been directing some of the same allegations that brought down Solheim at Unep: excessive travel, spending as much as two out of three weeks away from his base in Geneva and ties with the Chinese.
Kituyi is close to the Chinese tycoon Jack Ma, whom he has introduced to African leaders as they travel together. Ma has become an adviser to Kituyi and together they have established the Alibaba business school, named for Ma’s successful Amazon-style store.
The result of Kituyi’s ties to the business school and other large corporations has created a new kind of North-South split, with some development specialists in Europe opposed to the growing influence of multinational corporations in the policies and initiatives of Unctad.
A consultant for the Washington-based International Tax and Investment Center, a lobbying group that knows Unctad well, said in an interview that the agency has done nothing illegal.
Critics, however, have the support of core Unctad officials and some government donors, who call for the organization to return to its roots as an entity created by and for the developing world.
Mukhisa Kituyi, secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, at an e-commerce session on Africa, organized with the Alibaba Business School, April 1, 2019. HENRIQUE PACINI/UNCTAD
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, riven internally by disputes over its mission and future direction, may be in trouble. Faced with questions about its basic competence from board members and outside investigators, accusations have been gathering about unsatisfactory statistical work and laxity in meeting UN standards and regulations for spending reports by its leadership.
In the first of several recent investigations of Unctad, as the organization is known, a “working party” of member governments said in a report published in September 2018 that more evaluations of possible shortcomings of Unctad’s programs were needed. Some delegates raised the issue of rights, saying, “greater attention should be paid to the greater integration of gender and human rights aspects” in programs . . . “which were directly related to the right to development.”
In her response to these criticisms, Unctad’s deputy secretary-general, Isabelle Durant of Belgium — an international development policy expert appointed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in 2017 — noted that internal evaluations were being done and promised to detail them in the next review meeting in September 2019. Unctad is located in Geneva.
In March this year, the UN’s systemwide inspectorate, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, released results of an audit focused on Unctad’s statistical work, which was found to be very weak. “This audit was included in the 2018 risk-based work plan due to the risk that potential weaknesses in the provision of statistical services by Unctad could adversely affect the achievement of its objectives,” the auditors reported.
They listed flaws or gaps in governance, the tools and systems used for collecting data, managing statistics, disseminating findings and feedback, as well as technical cooperation and capacity-building in developing countries, which is Unctad’s prime purpose. Its performance could negatively affect progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.
Among the findings in the audit report was a reference to the scattershot collection of development data in various, sometimes overlapping, sections of Unctad, which some staff members call silos or “little empires.”
Unctad is reportedly missing basic information on its own statistical data. The auditors said: “Divisions in charge of statistical products that were not centrally managed . . . used various formats such as Excel or PDF and these products were not referenced under the statistical tab of the webpage of Unctad.”
By April, an unofficial group of governments, mainly in Europe and the Americas, took their concerns about Unctad to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, whose more developed, selected 36 member nations from both the global North and South regions are committed to, among other tasks, good statistical practices and transparency in public finance and tax collection in development work.
The OECD, based in Paris, does not have authority over Unctad, but its members often consult a related institution, the Multilateral Organization Performance Assessment Network, which monitors UN agencies. In an informal memo to and by OECD members, the group of governments critical of Unctad describes itself as frustrated enough to make it a priority demand that the UN address continuing lack of transparency and accountability in the trade organization.
That demand includes not only Unctad’s core functions but also issues related to the alleged use of extrabudgetary funds for questionable (and sometimes unauthorized) travel by high-level officials. Unctad, they argued, needs to follow UN-wide administrative rules and instructions.
Complicating reform of Unctad is its status in the UN system. It is not an agency like Unicef or the UN Development Program, where donors can exert considerable influence. Unctad was founded in 1964 by and for developing nations as well as China as a permanent standing conference for all UN member nations.
As finally approved by the General Assembly, its directorate was drawn from three regions that needed development policy planning — Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean — where numerous countries had only recently won independence from colonial rulers.
Unctad has its own secretary-general, always drawn from the regions for which it was created, although its deputy secretary-general often comes from a developed (and donor) country. Because of its status, Unctad gets most of its income from the regular UN budget. Donations from member countries are voluntary. Underlying some of the concern within Unctad as well as by outsiders is that the body, which has experienced dips in donations, will suffer more losses of extrabudgetary financing if accounts of incompetence and malfeasance persist or increase.
The current secretary-general is Mukhisa Kituyi, a former trade and industry minister of Kenya from 2002 to 2007, under President Mwai Kibaki, who served from 2002 to 2013. The Kibaki government was condemned internationally and in Kenya — a sharply divided country ethnically and politically — for widespread corruption. Regional African newspapers accused Kituyi of involvement in various scandals.
After the Kibaki government fell, John Githongo, Kenya’s most outspoken whistleblower and anticorruption activist, spoke at a forum on foreign policy in London in 2014, sponsored by the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom (UNA-UK). He told reporters on the sidelines that corruption was continuing to poison Kenyan politics, and the situation was compounded by terrorist threats in East Africa.
Moreover, Githongo said, close ties to China would only increase corruption everywhere in the developing world, including in Africa.
“Ever since we started engaging our Chinese colleagues in business, transparency has crashed, and that is causing considerable concern vis-a-vis corruption and its potential implications with regards to governance problems,” Githongo was quoted as saying in an interview with The Guardian.
In 2019, Kituyi had a different view, when he was criticized for his close partnership at Unctad with Jack Ma, the mega-rich Chinese entrepreneur who founded the immensely successful online shopping site Alibaba. Kituyi, who has introduced Ma to African leaders as they travel together, has named him his most-prominent special adviser. Together, they work with the Alibaba business school, named for Ma’s Amazon-style store. The school is Ma’s but Unctad claims a big role in its activities. It was originally based in China but has a wide reach now globally, specializing in e-commerce.
In a March 2019 interview published by the East African Review, Kituyi railed against corruption in Kenya, saying that a death penalty should be imposed on corrupters who cost countries millions in lost and stolen revenues. Kituyi, who is generally assumed to be seeking a political future in Kenya when his term at Unctad ends in 2021, then turned to what he saw as a model nation in his view, according to his interviewer, David Ndii, who wrote:
“He urged China, to help developing countries in waging a furious war against corruption as it has zero tolerance for graft.”
Kituyi’s ties to the Alibaba business school and other large corporations has been a factor in a new, expanding North-South split in Unctad, with some development specialists in Europe and elsewhere opposed to what they say is a growing influence of multinational corporations like Alibaba in the policies and initiatives of Unctad — not how the organization was conceived by its founders. The divisiveness is considered by some staff to be deeply disturbing.
But others are focused on the more concrete allegations of misuse of Unctad’s finances for Kituyi’s frequent travels, some of which have not proved to be necessary or even linked to the business of Unctad and may violate clearly stated UN administrative rules. Only recently, he spent a week in Silicon Valley that has not been explained.
Office records show sporadic circulation in Unctad of his travel agenda, although Kituyi is unofficially clocked to be away from his Geneva base for as much as two out of every three weeks. His record as a minister in Kenya was similar. Unctad staffers are acutely aware that Erik Solheim, the former executive director of the UN Environment Program, was asked by UN Secretary-General Guterres to resign last year after Solheim’s excessive, expensive travels became a pressing issue for donor nations.
Achim Steiner, a German-Brazilian, ran the United Nations Environment Program from 2009 to 2016. He was recently named to head the UN Development Program. Here, he rides an electric bike at the UN Environment Program base in Nairobi.
BERLIN — It is a widely held view in political circles here that Germany has not been adequately represented in the United Nations, apart from its relatively frequent elected membership to the Security Council, which Germany has held five times and which last year announced its candidacy for a sixth term for 2019-2020.
To be more precise: the criticism in Germany concerning fair representation refers to leading positions in UN funds, programs, specialized agencies and the Secretariat. There is some truth to the view: Germany has held the leadership position in the UN Environment Program, or UNEP, only twice: Klaus Topfer, from 1998 to 2007, and Achim Steiner, from 2009 to 2016. It has held no top position in a UN specialized agency.
As to the latter, at the UN in New York, only four Germans have led Secretariat departments as under secretaries-general: Helmut Debatin (Management, 1979-1981); Carl-August Fleischhauer (Office of Legal Affairs, 1983-1994); Karl-Theodor Paschke (Office of Internal Oversight Services, 1994-1999); and Angela Kane (Management and Office for Disarmament, respectively, 2008-2015). All four Germans acted in managerial functions and not in politically influential positions.
So there was quite some relief in Berlin when UN Secretary-General António Guterres named Achim Steiner as the new administrator of the UN Development Program, to succeed Helen Clark of New Zealand in June. Steiner, who has German and Brazilian nationality, is considered a good choice in UN circles because he achieved remarkable successes as head of the UN Environment Program, from 2006 to 2016, strengthening, above all, the financial basis of the program.
In Germany, the sense of satisfaction in political arenas was pronounced after Steiner’s appointment as well as the naming of Ursula Mueller of Germany as assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
Nevertheless, Germany has not been consistently successful in recent years in placing candidates in top UN jobs:
In 2011, Angela Kane, having served the UN in many functions for more than 30 years, applied as an incumbent under secretary-general for management for the post of director-general of the UN Office at Geneva (UNOG), but without political support from Berlin. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ignored her brilliant qualities as a candidate and appointed instead a former Kazakh prime minister, Kassymschomart Tokajew, who had no UN experience but was obviously an appointment to please the permanent Security Council members Russia and China.
In 2015, Steiner, the UN Environment Program head, ran for the post of UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Once more, Ban decided against the German candidate and appointed an Italian, Filippo Grandi.
The same thing happened in 2015 to the candidacy of a longstanding UN top official, Franz Baumann, a German who was running for deputy high commissioner for human rights. But Ban picked Flavia Pansieri of Italy instead, whose reputation was clouded amid revelations related to allegations of sex abuse by French peacekeepers in the Central African Republic. The job is now held by an Australian, Kate Gilmore.
Angela Kane became a candidate again in 2016, after she had been urged by Ban in March 2015 to resign from her post as head of the Office of Disarmament Affairs after only three years to make space for Ban’s Korean colleague in the Secretariat, Kim Won-soo. Kane was then presented as the official German candidate for the post of the executive director of the World Food Program in addition to another official German candidate, Martin Kobler, a well-proven mediator in many UN missions and now special envoy of the UN support mission in Libya (Unsmil). Both candidacies were unsuccessful because of strong pressure from Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the UN, to give the job to a fellow American, David Beasley. Guterres assigned the post to Beasley in March 2017. Again, the interests of a big power prevailed over the excellent candidacies of two German UN insiders, with the US keeping the post traditionally under its control.
Also in 2016, Jochen Flasbarth, the German candidate to succeed Steiner as head of the UN Environment Program and a well-respected international negotiator, lost out to Erik Solheim of Norway.
This series of candidacies unable to obtain these posts has been particularly disappointing for Germany, as it still is markedly underrepresented in high-level positions in the UN. At the uppermost level, Germany is represented only by Kobler (in rank equivalent to an under secretary-general, or USG); Mueller (assistant secretary-general, or ASG); and now Steiner, with the rank of under secretary-general.
To sum up: If one takes Germany’s role as the fourth-largest payer to the regular budget of the UN into account (contributing 6.39 percent, after the US with 22 percent, Japan with 9.68 percent and China with 7.92 percent), the persistent lack of adequate representation of Germany in leading UN positions cannot be considered politically fair.
Other member countries contributing less financially are far-better represented, according to the current list of senior officials issued in April 2017 by the UN Secretariat:
• France, fifth-largest payer (4.86 percent), has five UN officials in under-secretary-general level positions and three in assistant-secretary-general level positions.
• Britain, sixth-largest payer (4.46 percent), has six UN officials in under-secretary-general level positions and nine in assistant-secretary-general level positions.
• Japan (9.68 percent) and China (7.92 percent) are significantly underrepresented: China has one official on each level and Japan has two under secretaries-general and one assistant secretary-general.
• Russia, the eighth-largest payer (3.088 percent), has also only one official on each level, comparable to China.
Notwithstanding the differences in quantity, the five permament members of the Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia and the US) make effective use of their political weight to gain important top positions in the UN Secretariat: an American is leading the Department of Political Affairs; Britain heads the Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs; France has the Department of Peacekeeping Operations; Russia, the director-general of the UN Office in Vienna, functioning also as the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime; and China provides the under secretary-general for Economic and Social Affairs.
It is not surprising that Angela Kane criticized the unsatisfactory situation for Germany in a public hearing of the Subcommittee on United Nations Affairs of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag in June 2015, saying, “With regard to UN top positions, Germany is miserably represented.”
Kane noted at the hearing that she thought the main reason for the low numbers was the reserved attitude of German politicians toward the UN, saying, “Other states use a rather robust and forceful approach in UN personnel policy.”
The lessons to be learned from the lack of strong support from Germany are evident: German politicians should understand the importance of having excellent experts and negotiators in the UN, back their candidates for top jobs robustly and accompany that effort with financial commitments, as this has proven to be helpful in competition for these UN jobs.
On the other hand, the UN secretary-general and the General Assembly should learn from the examples of Kane and Steiner that it is worthwhile to choose the best woman or man for a top position and not to follow the questionable habit of giving a certain UN post traditionally to a certain nation.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has existed at the periphery of UN agencies and been a focus of critics almost since its founding in 1945, as the vehicle for ending hunger and achieving food security.
Based in Rome, the FAO has 194 member nations and many projects designed to raise the standards of agriculture and meet the needs of millions of malnourished people. But it remains a niche specialized agency that often works with larger UN entities, such as the World Health Organization.
The FAO has been criticized from both the left and right — from the Slow Food movement to US officialdom — for its policies, performance and integrity of leadership.
China sees an opening.
On or around June 23, FAO member nations will elect a new director-general, and the Chinese candidate appears to be in the lead. The organization is a major player in the fate of Sustainable Development Goal 2, which calls for “zero hunger” by 2030. China’s motivations in pushing for the director-general job are mixed.
Diplomats from industrial nations have said in the past that China wants a significant role in the global food trade not only as a seller of commodities and technology but also as an importer of foodstuffs from reliable sources for its huge, more affluent population. The Chinese have established agricultural projects around the developing world, many in Africa, with this role in mind. They have occasionally met local resentment and protests because of their exclusionary behavior toward local people.
With the United States retreating from international leadership under the Trump administration, beginning in 2017, China has not been short of opportunities to move into more positions but stronger ones as well at the UN to serve its national interests. It seeks more positions in the UN Secretariat hierarchy, plays a bigger role in peacekeeping and most recently has emerged as a power in the UN Human Rights Council, from which the US has withdrawn.
Human Rights Watch has followed the growing influence of the Chinese in the UN.
“In 2017, Human Rights Watch exposed Beijing’s efforts to silence U.N. human rights experts and staff, to prevent critical voices from China from participating in U.N. processes, and to manipulate rules and procedures to ensure more favorable reviews,” the human-rights group said in a report. “The net effect: weaker United Nations scrutiny, not just of China but of other abusive governments.”
Three final candidates remain in the race for director-general of the FAO, after the recent withdrawal of a nominee from India. They are the Chinese candidate, Qu Dongyu, vice minister of agriculture and rural affairs; Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle, former director of the French ministry of agriculture and food and the European Union’s candidate; and Davit Kirvalidze, a former minister of agriculture in Georgia and now adviser to the country’s prime minister on agriculture and rural development. Kirvalidze is regarded as the American candidate; he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Maryland, where he studied farming and rural development in transition economies.
The new director-general will succeed José Graziano da Silva of Brazil. His seven predecessors in the position were, chronologically, a Briton, two Americans and one each from India, the Netherlands, Lebanon and Senegal.
The US only recently confirmed an ambassador to its mission in Rome to work with Rome-based international organizations, including the UN’s FAO, the World Food Program and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
The new ambassador, Kip Tom, who has had scant time to involve himself in the succession issue at FAO, is neither a negotiator nor a diplomat. Nevertheless, he was confirmed an ambassador by the US Senate on April 11. He is a farmer from Indiana, the home state of Vice President Mike Pence.
The State Department describes Ambassador Tom as “an agribusiness leader who transformed a seventh-generation farm into one of the largest commodity businesses in the Midwestern United States, while launching international operations and deploying new technologies.”
Tom, who grew up on a family farm, turned it into an agribusiness of 25,000 acres in the US and Argentina, the State Department said in announcing his confirmation. He is also a philanthropist, but there were no details about those activities in the announcement.
The confirmation had the appearance of a hastily arranged event perhaps because the Trump administration didn’t know — or didn’t care — that it was in danger of seeing its favored candidate in the FAO election, the Georgian, lose to China while the US did not have an ambassador in Rome to track the election. This would be the first Communist country to hold the FAO director-general’s chair.
Newspapers in Indiana had been wondering what happened to Tom’s appointment, which was announced in August 2018 but not sent for a confirmation hearing until April.
“It was 9 months ago when President Trump tapped him for the position,” an article in Hoosier Ag Today commented when Tom was finally confirmed in April. Tom’s vision, as reported by the publication, was more about American food security and the Trump-Pence America First message than about hungry people in poor countries.
“My goal in serving as ambassador will be to improve our missions’ outcomes to serve the interests of the American people,” Tom was quoted as saying. “If you confirm me, I will bring all my knowledge, work ethic and skills to bear to ensure that this becomes a reality. I will do it in ways that I hope brings honor to our country, our values, and our national interests. . . . I cannot imagine a better honor than to serve in a leadership capacity and be a small part in advancing U.S. global food security efforts to create a more stable, food-secure world.”
Qu, the Chinese candidate for FAO, has a string of qualifications from agricultural development work in the UN and countries around the world. He has been more circumspect than Tom but direct about his goals. In a conversation at an FAO meeting in April with Kevin Moley, the US assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, Qu rejected the charge that he would be beholden to instructions from Beijing.
He vowed that China would follow “FAO regulations and rules.” He defended his credentials, then segued into his own national priorities, according to people at FAO who heard the exchange.
“I am a scientist,” Qu said. “I always do things based on my own judgment, even [if] I am a vice minister. That is why I push the digital farming in China. I think it is good for Chinese people, it is good for Chinese farmers. . . . You have to believe my professionalism because I got [my] education from Europe, America and China.”
Pierre Krahenbuhl, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency, which administers to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, at a conference in Rome, March 2018. The agency, which was significantly rocked by the withdrawal of American donations last year, is now caught up in a possible ethics scandal.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which has been undermined by a sharp cut in United States contributions, has been embroiled in a scandal that threatens to jeopardize its very future.
A report from the agency’s Ethics Office has found “credible and corroborated” evidence that the senior management of Unrwa engaged in “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent, and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives.”
As a result, two donors, Switzerland and the Netherlands, immediately suspended payments to the UN agency; Belgium followed suit soon after, with the possibility of others to follow.
In January 2018, the Trump administration announced it was withholding $65 million out of a $125 million aid package earmarked for Unrwa, a veritable lifeline for more than five million registered Palestinian refugees, for nearly 70 years.
That move was prompted primarily for political reasons.
Paula Donovan and Stephen Lewis, co-directors of the nongovernmental organization, AIDS-Free World, and its Code Blue Campaign, which seeks to end impunity for sexual abuse by UN personnel, told Inter-Press Service that the incriminating report was received in the UN secretary-general’s office eight months ago.
“He should immediately have suspended the principals involved and replaced them with interim appointments,” they said. “Had he done so, Switzerland and the Netherlands would not have suspended payment to Unrwa and the indispensable work of the agency would not have been compromised.”
“If the Unrwa story had not been broken by the media, the Secretary-General would not have acted. Alas, that’s the pattern,” they added.
Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters on Aug. 1, “I have been acting quite significantly to make sure that we strengthen Unrwa and Unrwa’s capacity to deliver.”
“I’ve been appealing for the support to Unrwa to all countries of the world as I think we should distinguish what are the revelations made, or accusations made, in relation to members of the management of Unrwa, from the needs to preserve Unrwa, to support Unrwa, and to make Unrwa effective in the very important action in relation to the Palestine refugees, and I’ve been acting consistently to support that.”
In the current situation, Guterres pointed out, the deputy of Unrwa has resigned, and “so I decided that it would be important to immediately appoint a new deputy as acting deputy and, as I said, in relation to any intervention that might [be] justified, I will wait, according to due process, for the results of the inquiry and, based on the results of the inquiry, I will act accordingly.”
According to Unrwa, the agency is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions. The only exception is a limited subsidy from the regular budget of the UN, which is used exclusively for administrative costs.
“The work of Unrwa could not be carried out without sustained contributions from state and regional governments, the European Union and other government partners, which represented 93.28 per cent of all contributions in 2018,” the agency said.
In 2018, it added, 50 percent of the agency’s total pledges of $1.27 billion came from European Union countries, who contributed $643 million, including through the European Commission.
The European Union (including the European Commission), Germany and Saudi Arabia were the largest individual donors, contributing a cumulative 40 percent of the agency’s total funding. Britain and Sweden were also among the top-five donors.
The Trump administration said in August 2018 that it carefully reviewed the issue and determined that the US would not make additional contributions to the UN agency.
“When we made a US contribution of $60 million in January, we made it clear that the United States was no longer willing to shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden of Unwra’s costs that we had assumed for many years,” according to the US State Department.
“Beyond the budget gap itself and failure to mobilize adequate and appropriate burden sharing, the fundamental business model and fiscal practices that have marked Unrwa for years – tied to Unrwa’s endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries – is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years,” the statement continued.
“The United States will no longer commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation.”
UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters on July 30 that Guterres believes it’s essential that Unrwa gets the support it needs and “so we will be looking to make sure that all of the countries that have been generous in donating to Unrwa will continue to be able to support that, and will look at engaging with them to see what can be done to satisfy them.”
“Clearly, this is an agency – as we have been saying in the last few years, when, as you know, it faced a financial crisis – this is an agency whose work is critical to the lives, to the health, to the education of millions of people, millions of Palestinians across the region, and they have been a vital source of stability, not just for those people but for the region itself,” he added.
Asked for a response about the charges against Unrwa, Haq said there is an investigation on the allegations contained in the report.
“Until this investigation is completed, the secretary-general is not in a position to make any further comments on this matter. As he has shown in the past, the secretary-general is committed to acting swiftly, as appropriate, upon receiving the full report. The secretary-general continues to consider the work undertaken by Unrwa as absolutely essential to Palestinian refugees,” he added.
Asked who was conducting the investigation, Haq said: “This is happening by our Office of Internal Oversight Services. Now, I’ll leave it for you to evaluate the sufficiency of the steps that are taken once we take them; but, like I said, I’ve assured you the secretary-general is ready to take action upon receiving this . . . the full report.”
In a statement released Aug. 1, Code Blue said the ethics report asserts that the alleged conduct of Unrwa’s senior leaders — Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl, Deputy Commissioner-General Sandra Mitchell, Chief of Staff Hakam Shahwan and Senior Adviser to the Commissioner-General Maria Mohammedi — presents “an enormous risk to the reputation of the UN” and “their immediate removal should be carefully considered.”
The ethics report was leaked to the media last week. But it was completed and delivered to the UN secretary-general in December 2018. Mitchell and Shahwan have since left the agency of their own accord. Both Krahenbuhl and Mohammedi remain in their posts, said the statement.
Code Blue also said the secretary-general has ignored the ethics report’s recommendation that Krahenbuhl and Mohammedi be removed immediately.
Instead, the UN has responded to the report by ordering yet another internal investigation, this time by the Office of Internal Oversight Services, which is ongoing. In effect, the UN has taken no substantive action to address the crisis at Unrwa.
The Netherlands and Switzerland have responded to the revelations by suspending funding to Unrwa, joined by Belgium. Britain is considering such a step. It should go without saying that the work of Unrwa is too important to be sacrificed to the UN’s willingness to allow the crisis to worsen, Code Blue added.
This article originally appeared in Inter Press Service News Agency.
Lieut. Comdr. Marcia Braga, left, a 45-year-old Brazilian naval officer, spent a year as a UN military gender adviser in the war-wracked Central African Republic, above. She called it “the most rewarding experience she has ever had.” BRAGA ARCHIVES
In one of the world’s most fragile and violent settings, Lieut. Comdr. Marcia Braga, a 45-year-old Brazilian naval officer, arrived in April 2018 as the third military gender adviser for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic. She ended her yearlong stint there bestowed with the UN’s annual Military Gender Advocate award and called her time in the country “the most rewarding experience she has ever had.”
For a naval officer working in the Central African Republic, a landlocked nation known as CAR, the challenges for Braga couldn’t have been more arduous. Born in Rio de Janeiro to a nonmilitary family, Braga joined the Navy in 2001 and specialized in maritime security; she is married to a police officer and has no children. When asked why she wanted to become a blue helmet, or UN peacekeeper, Braga said, “I have always wanted to make myself useful.”
In an interview at the UN in New York this summer, Braga highlighted her most important contribution to the peacekeeping mission, Minusca: to carry out the mandate of protecting civilians. She did so her own way: creating a countrywide network of UN military gender focal points to monitor and report on the status of women and girls. While describing her work as the gender adviser, Braga also shared how the UN can better put the women, peace and security agenda — requiring women’s participation in peace talks and other gender equality practices — into action. (Currently, there are only 10 Brazilian peacekeepers working for Minusca.)
Indeed, it was only in February 2019 when the Central African Republic government and 14 armed groups signed the Political Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation, intended to establish a new, more inclusive government and helping to stabilize a county that has been in the grips of a vicious crisis for six years. With about 15,000 UN peacekeepers in the country, peace may be possible now.
Here is how Braga described her year in Africa, including experiencing a riot followed by a car crash in her first month. The interview has been edited and condensed.
Q. Where were you originally deployed in the Central African Republic in April 2018? What were your first impressions?
A. I was deployed in Bangui, the capital, where Minusca headquarters are located. My first impression was that the situation in Bangui was relatively calm. However, during my first month there, popular protests erupted, and I suffered an attack that led me to the hospital. A colleague and I were driving a UN car and some civilians started throwing stones and bricks against us. Our car eventually crashed against a tree and I got my hip injured.
I was discharged from the hospital the following day, but when I got out, the government had imposed restrictions around Bangui, which made it impossible for me to get to my home. So I had to move in with a UN civilian staff member, a Spanish colleague who worked on protection of civilians. She was very kind to have me in, and her support was paramount while I was undergoing medical treatment. I developed a tumor in my hip, a swelling due to internal bleeding. I had to go back to the hospital and have surgery. The tumor was removed, but it returned in the same place several times. The Serbian doctor [part of Minusca] who was responsible for my treatment was already saying he would have to repatriate me if I didn’t get better soon. But I really wanted to stay and was determined to get better. I was really happy when I finally showed up at Minusca’s HQ for the first time on May 22, 2018, to start working.
Q. That’s definitely not how you would expect to hit the ground running! So after you finally started working for Minusca, what were your routines and your main duties?
A. When I assumed my post, there were no established work routines; no specific directives from superiors or any information on violations against women. The only thing I was told was that I was expected to produce a one-year action plan to guide my work as the gender adviser. The lack of organizational memory was a challenge at the beginning, but it also gave me the chance to improvise and create. The most important thing was setting up a mechanism that would allow me to collect information from populations in all parts of the country. For instance, in a specific area, are there women and children at risk or in vulnerable situations? Are there reports of conflict-related sexual violence or gender-based violence or any other violations against women and children?
To get this information, we needed a network of military gender focal points selected among officers already deployed in each union and battalion in the mission. Their main role would be to understand the life of men, women, boys and girls in a community and dialogue with the population, particularly with local women leaders. This way, they could get information on how the conflict affected the local population and to advise their commanders on how to address possible violations.
Q. The plan to establish a network of gender focal points nationwide seems straightforward. Did you get the support you needed to implement it?
A. By June 2018, I had my plan ready and I started by writing to the DPO [Department of Peace Operations] in New York and to the units’ and battalions’ commanders in the field [in CAR], requesting focal points. Some of them [commanders] answered but many did not. I then brought my ideas to the deputy force commander [of Minusca]. His first impression was that my plan was too ambitious. I remember that he asked me, How many years do you think you will stay here? Nonetheless, he saw the merits of my ideas and ended up supporting them. His approval and that of the force commander gave me the leverage I needed for getting support from every unit of Minusca.
The first gender focal point was finally nominated by the commander of the battalion in Bria, a city in the east that hosts the country’s largest refugee and IDP [internally displaced persons] camp, with more than 50,000 people. I decided to travel there and meet her in person. When I saw their reality, I realized that for my plan to work, I would have to maintain a close relationship with the focal points and colleagues in the field. As the military gender adviser in headquarters, I had a responsibility to create awareness in the field about gender issues, to bring light to the violations that Minusca was expected to prevent and suggest ways to better identify and address them. For instance, it was important that women peacekeepers could always participate in patrols in areas where there were a lot of women in the population and that those patrols didn’t stay restricted to the main roads.
With this conviction, I started traveling throughout the country to visit and train every new gender focal point and talk to colleagues in the field about Minusca’s mandate on the protection of civilians. During the visits, I always requested meetings with the local leadership and representatives of the civilian and police components [of Minusca]. The focal points attended the meetings with me. This also improved the communication within units. In many places, civilians and military did not used to talk. It was especially fruitful to exchange information with heads of offices, human rights, civil affairs, women protection advisers, child protection advisers, UNPOL [UN Police] and military observers.
Q. You must have developed a good assessment of the needs of the local populations from your visits. How was your personal contact with the people in these areas?
A. Wherever I went to a new area, I always participated in day and night patrols and talked to the people. I had numerous meetings with women leaders all over the country; in every small village I visited, every women’s group had a leader. In a community you could find different groups of women living together, such as widows or goat shepherdesses. In those groups, they often had different religions but lived together peacefully. Minusca’s civilian gender cell had already established contact with most of those leaders, and I took advantage of that structure. I would wear my UN uniform, approach them talking in French and simply say that my goal was to improve their safety. In comparison with the men in their communities, the women I met were more committed to peace, especially because they were more concerned for the well-being of their families. In many communities, the men were responsible for raising cattle, whereas women were the household’s main providers.
Lieut. Comdr. Braga receiving the UN’s annual Military Gender Advocate Award, in 2019, with another Portuguese speaker, UN Secretary-General Guterres. Bragg said that if the Central African Republic is the least-developed country in the world, then that is where the UN needs to be working. UN PHOTO
Q. What did you learn from your contacts with local women leaders in the Central African Republic? What were their most frequent demands?
A. Local women leaders often provided us with information concerning the activities of illegal armed groups in their area. For instance, they would report on the arrival of a new armed group or on the establishment of illegal checkpoints even before the mission was aware of it. They also shared valuable information on their own daily routines. For instance, many of them felt especially vulnerable to sexual assaults when they were walking long distances (10 to 20 kilometers) to reach their plantations every day. Sometimes, armed groups established illegal checkpoints in those areas and women had to pass through them while they were walking from home to work.
They also often asked for our assistance for basic needs, like scarce supplies of water and firewood. They asked us to provide them with French courses or to teach them professional skills that could lead to their economic empowerment.
Q. Did you deal with many cases of sexual violence in CAR?
A. Yes, sexual violence was reported more often in some communities than others. Some shepherd communities [often from the Fulani ethnic group] practiced transhumance [moving livestock around] during the dry season, because they periodically needed to lead their cattle to new areas. They often establish ties with armed groups, which demand participation in the lucrative cattle business in exchange for providing “security for the routes.” The shepherds and armed groups often crossed paths with women from local communities, and this is when most cases of sexual assaults were reported. Most of the rapes took place on roads, near shrubs and plantations, when women were on their way to plantations or to fetch water. In Kaga Bandoro, for example, we had 100 cases of sexual violence reported in two months during transhumance. Before the establishment of the gender focal points and my visits, we hadn’t had access to this kind of information in Bangui.
Another factor to consider is that sexual violence is underreported. Many communities don’t treat rape as a serious crime when it doesn’t lead to the death of the victim. Victims do not always report cases of sexual violence to the UN military and police, because it takes time and effort for people to trust in UN troops. Whenever a feeling of shame or fear of impunity was predominant, it prevented victims from reporting and getting access to psychological support or a health treatment against sexually transmitted diseases, which must happen within 72 hours of the crime. It is of paramount importance to have more female military and police officers in the patrols, which helps build trust and closer ties between the UN force and women in the communities and encourages them to report violations.
Q. Among all the communities you visited in CAR, which were particularly inspiring?
A. I had a great experience in the village of Birao, on the border with Sudan, where I saw the greatest engagement of the Minusca staff with the community. The battalion there is from Zambia, and they have the best female-engagement rate of Minusca. They have an all-female patrol — even the driver is a woman. And I was so thrilled that they welcomed me with an all-female honor guard! It is my assessment that they are a success because the battalion got really involved in various projects in the community. They participated in starting a community garden so that women don’t always have to walk long distances to get food. They also helped build a solar panel and a water pump. They had only one case of sexual violence in a one-year period. They resolve their daily disputes peacefully, and the blue helmets [peacekeepers] even get involved with working in hospitals and schools, organizing hygiene campaigns and advocating for more girls in schools. In Birao, armed groups no longer see much sense in continuing the cycle of violence, since everybody is working together for the welfare of the community.
Q. What is your legacy in the mission and to the people of CAR?
A. My greatest legacy was to create the framework for the gender advisers and to have left everything well documented. The other legacy was the women’s-engagement teams: battalions with a fair number of female blue helmets who began to engage more with the local people. Still, my feeling is that I did not finish my work there. There is not much conversation about the situation in CAR, but the people there, even if they look hopeless and are desperate, they ask for neither money nor food but only for the means to work with dignity. Without support from the international community, they will stay stuck, unable to overcome their fragility. If CAR is the least-developed country in the world, I believe that is precisely where the UN needs to be the most.
Q. What’s next for you now that you will return to Rio?
A. I want to continue to protect civilians. Today I cannot see myself doing anything else. Never before in my entire life did I feel as happy and useful as in CAR. Although my family was not there, I did not feel alone. Now I’m back in Rio de Janeiro, where I am in charge of the Naval Peace Operations Training Center for Brazilian Navy military personnel, which will be deployed to UN peacekeeping missions. When my time in the Navy is up, I want to continue working as a civilian at the UN.
