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“This is a ‘sigh of relief’ party which we do on an annual basis to celebrate the liberation of Turtle Bay because every year there is an invasion here,” IPI President Terje Rød-Larsen told guests who thronged the Trgyve Lie Center on Tuesday night, September 26, 2017.
“They arrive by plane, all the peacocks, all 193 come in motorcades, with blue lights, and they make life miserable for permanent representatives and ambassadors who are normally the kings of the hill here but are now demoted to servants,” he continued.
“But, of course, when they leave, there is a sigh of relief, and so we’ve invited you here tonight to celebrate the liberation of Turtle Bay.”
Among those who joined in the light-hearted festivities was the guest of honor, Miroslav Lajčák, the Foreign Minister of Slovakia, who is the new President of the General Assembly.
“Relax,” he told the party goers, “but not for too long. We have already started the next stage, with the first high level today and the second tomorrow so I hate to disappoint you.”
He reported that this year there had been 196 General Debate statements delivered from the General Assembly podium, the most ever in a High Level Week.
He also participated in IPI’s Sustaining Peace Stories collaborative project, answering the three questions:
“What does peace mean to you?”
“What are the obstacles to achieving peace?” and
“What would overcome these obstacles?”
His answers, in order, were:
“Peace to me means that you feel safe and secure, that you know that your dignity is protected and your rights are respected. Peace also means that you can blend your personal future and your professional future, and you don’t have to make any compromises.”
“There are many but basically the main obstacle is bad politics and a bad economy, which is also the result of bad politics, but it could also be climate change that results in a shortage of food and water.”
“We need more political will. We need more political commitment to peace. We need for peace to become really the number one priority. When we speak about peace, we have to mean peace being the most important thing and then we can achieve peace.”
La excepción alemana se ha acabado. Igual que sus vecinos el pueblo alemán y sus élites van a tener que enfrentarse al problema del nacionalismo excluyente, antiglobalización, anti-UE y antiinmigración.
Emmanuel Macron s’apprête à formuler ses propositions en vue d’approfondir la construction européenne. Une initiative indispensable pour remédier au sentiment de l’impuissance publique en France, plaide le professeur des universités à Sciences Po et Directeur général de la Fondation pour l’innovation politique. Ce n’est qu’en apparence que la construction européenne contredit l’idée de souveraineté nationale […]
Cet article La souveraineté européenne, dernière chance pour la France d’écrire l’histoire est apparu en premier sur Fondapol.
Three experts including IPI Visiting Fellow Alexandra Novosseloff discussed UN Security Council reform in this TRT World segment, touching on the divisive issues the world body faces such as nationalism and a lack of political will.
Ms. Novosseloff noted that, “the Security Council is a reflection of the divisions of the world,” but still believes that we should remain optimistic of the Security Council’s ability to adapt. Though the possibility of reform was discussed by all three experts—Ms. Novosseloff was joined by Mona Khalil of Independent Diplomat and Salman Shaikh of the Shaikh Group— she argued that expanding the Security Council would mean more voices which could complicate the process further.
Despite these shortcomings of the Security Council to act in situations such as Syria and Myanmar, the three experts remained optimistic that the change was possible, with Ms. Novosseloff arguing that the “UN has been reforming itself for decades.”
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IPI and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) of Switzerland co-sponsored a policy forum on September 22, 2017 to share and discuss the conclusions and recommendations of the second regional conversation on “Investing in Peace and Prevention in the Sahel-Sahara” held in N’Djamena, Chad four months ago.
That meeting, which addressed the nature of violent extremism in the region as perceived by those directly affected by it (main conclusions here), had followed the first one, in Dakar in June, 2016, and a precursor seminar in Tunis in November, 2015.
This latest discussion featured a panel of participants from the N’Djamena talks, one of whom, Jean-Daniel Biéler, Special Adviser for Central Africa, Human Security Division of the FDFA, acknowledged that violent extremism in the Sahel had not diminished since the Dakar meeting 15 months ago but asserted that he now saw “a lot of advances that are important for our understanding of what could be a preventative approach.”
“We have seen that there is no specific profile for a violent person,” he said, “but there is a profile of the groups who use violence to get to their goals, and they will use all cracks and gaps in our social structure to get through.”
To forestall that, he said, “we need to re-anchor our own political values where we are practicing them–from representative elections, to access to political expression, to environmental preservation. Communities, NGOs, and states have to take our responsibilities and open the door for dialogue wherever it is.”
Olivier Zehnder, Switzerland’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said the N’Djamena talks had shown that “there are more and more voices that want to gain in preventing violence. The main thing that comes out of these conversations is that we have to speak, and to speak, we have to meet.”
Steven Siqueira, Deputy Director of the UN Office of Counterterrorism, said that while it had become clear that “harsh crackdowns and heavy handed approaches can be counterproductive,” more emphasis needed to be put on developing alternative approaches. “We’ll only succeed in addressing the increasingly transnational threat of terrorism if we develop a new and comprehensive agenda for multilateral cooperation with a focus on prevention,” he said.
Specifically, he said, “the international community must do more to address the roots of radicalization including real and perceived injustices, high levels of unemployment, and grievances among young people.”
Involving women directly in negotiating for peace and preventing violence was the fervently uttered demand of Madeleine Memb, journalist and representative of MediaWomen4Peace in Cameroon. The fact that women in the region are burdened by living with debilitating personal loss and in real distress does not inhibit their ability to make a meaningful contribution, but quite the opposite, she argued.
By way of example, she said, “We questioned a woman who saw her child beheaded in front of her, and she said, ‘What I am looking for is that women need to be supported.’”
“Can women play a role in investment policy?” she asked. “I say, ‘Yes.’ At the high level, understand feminist existence, women participating actively in decision-making levels, to orient policy to take into account what they are seeing, what they are living.”
Asserting that when women go into politics, policies become more effective, she contended, “It’s time now that we give women the means, which, contrary to what you might think, is not a question of material means, but it’s psychological solutions, answers, words to reflect on their suffering, to try to understand what’s happening to them, to try to understand why their child is being radicalized.”
Aliyu Gebi, Senior Special Adviser of the Nigerian Ministry of Interior, said that though his region suffered from “weaponized poverty, layered with weaponized religion and weaponized politics,” he believed peace was still possible if organized society adjusted itself to the “reality on the ground.”
He defined peace as “the ability to allow my children to go outside and play, to go to the mosque, park, market, movies, to come back home without my worrying about where they are. Peace means mothers allowed to be mothers, fathers to be fathers, and children to be children,” he said. But he warned, “At any point in time that this balance is disturbed, there will be problems in society.”
An optimistic note was sounded by Gali Ngothé Gatta, parliament member from Chad. “The Lake Chad region is being rebuilt even though a few Boko Haram fighters are sowing death and destruction,” he said. “The first sign of progress I observed in Chad was the actors associating themselves together to help communities reorient themselves.”
Among them, he identified agricultural workers, religious leaders, women’s organizations, local politicians, members of civil society, and the international community including NGOs, the European Union and the UN.
He concluded: “The state had a monopoly on the debate, but now it’s an open debate, discussing what is going on, why they are mobilizing young children in violence.”
Youssef Mahmoud, IPI Senior Adviser, moderated the discussion.
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“It’s a place with hope in very short supply, Yemen,” said Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, opening his presentation at an IPI Humanitarian Affairs Series event on “Addressing the Humanitarian Situation in Yemen” September 22nd.
“There is no citizen in that country spared by what’s going on,” he said. “What you’ve got is a man-made crisis with people touched by it who have no power to stop it.”
A two-and-a-half-year-old conflict in Yemen has turned the country into what the UN says is now the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and largest food insecurity crisis.
The current hostilities erupted in March of 2015, just months after the arrival of Mr. McGoldrick, a seasoned UN humanitarian official with past service in places like Nepal, Pakistan, Georgia, and Lebanon. The conflict pitted a Saudi-led coalition loyal to the internationally recognized government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and those allied with the Houthi rebel movement and widely thought to be supported by Iran.
As a result of fighting since then–much of it involving devastating attacks from the air–the economy is now near collapse, public and private services have all but disappeared, and average citizens, having lost their livelihoods and whatever savings they had, face tremendous hardship while the most vulnerable are struggling simply to survive.
Supplying the stark details, Mr. McGoldrick said that 7 million Yemenis faced the threat of famine, and that there are already 650,000 cases of cholera, a statistic he said was expected to rise. Food insecurity, already critical, has jumped 20 percent this year; 50 percent of all health structures have been destroyed; 1.2 million civil service workers, 30,000 of them health workers, have not been paid, and up to 10,000 people, by the count of the Norwegian Refugee Council, have died prematurely without treatment or because travel out of the country is blocked.
“People go in villages and die because there’s no health service for them,” he said. “They die because the cancer services don’t work, the blood bank doesn’t work, dialysis doesn’t work, insulin’s not available.”
Air strikes in the first six months of 2017 equal the number in all of last year, and military activity is “heavily stalemated,” he said. “There are many instances of armed clashes, shellings and IEDs, and their indiscriminate nature is unparalleled.”
There is an overall disdain for international humanitarian and human rights law by all parties in the conflict, with killing and wounding of civilians, recruitment of child soldiers, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and unlawful restrictions on the passage of humanitarian assistance.
“The belligerents understand their obligations under the Geneva Conventions, but there’s a blatant disregard for them,” Mr. McGoldrick declared. “No matter what we do to talk to the parties, we get silence, we get indifference, and until that changes, we will have this recurring humanitarian nightmare.”
Everyone realizes that the war is a “massive failure,” he said, “but we still have to get the parties to be much more willing to accept a political solution.”
In a final commentary on the inhumanity of the situation, he said, “You never hear any of these parties ever say caring statements about the population. That’s not what they care about. What they care about is political gain, and that has to change.”
He said the only way a humanitarian response can get through is “to end the war.”
The moderator was Warren Hoge, IPI’s Senior Adviser for External Relations.