|
USIP Event: Jan Egeland - Protecting people
March 11, 2008
By Beth Hearn
Jan Egeland, Director General of the Norwegian Foreign Affairs Institute, has a high-profile history within the United Nations and the arena of humanitarian issues. He is a former Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Emergency Relief Coordinator, and Special Envoy for Columbia. As State Secretary in the Norwegian Ministry for Foreign Affairs he initiated the Norwegian channel between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation that led to the Oslo Accord in 1993. As such, he is more than qualified to speak on the issue of “Protecting people.”
This is exactly what he did at the United States Institute of Peace on March 11, providing observations and recommendations on international affairs and humanitarian issues. He began by saying that he is still very much an optimist: “The world is changing dramatically, and the challenges we face are changing dramatically, but the fact remains that the world is getting better for most of us,” Egeland said, citing the general trend for reduction of hunger, less deaths from preventable diseases, fewer genocides, and less military coups.
Søren Jessen-Petersen, who has held numerous positions in the United Nations and the European Union, most recently Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General and head of the U.N. Mission in Kosovo, said that the Security Council is becoming increasingly irrelevant in internal conflicts. The members of the Security Council are often divided, as in the case of Kosovo, he said, meaning that there is no clear resolution.
Our biggest hope in pushing forward the responsibility to protect is an increasingly active civil society, Jessen-Petersen said. Pressure is growing from the grassroots, meaning that it is increasingly difficult for states to ignore a principle that they have signed up to and they “cannot hide inside borders anymore,” he added. New technology means that we can get anywhere at any time, added Egeland, thus vastly increasing our capability to address situations.
There is a trend that can be seen the world over, to ignore the conflicts in African nations, said Egeland, citing the dwindling number of correspondents present in the continent. “Thousands of articles are written daily on the presidential race – Obama, Hillary, McCain…What about the Congo? Five million people have died since 1998,” he said. Al Jazeera is the one exception, though, he argued, having opened twelve new bureaus in Africa.
Egeland stressed that the importance of strategic interest cannot be ignored in crisis management. He noted that recent conflicts in some areas – for example Lebanon, which is of great importance in terms of wider Middle East issues, and Kenya, which has been viewed as a stable Western ally and where the few media correspondents actually present in Africa tend to be based – receive large amounts of coverage, while others go by virtually unnoticed.
A major reason for humanitarian failures is that “the wrong nations push the right issues at the wrong times,” Egeland continued. The world should be seen as an orchestra, he said, where the orchestra is the United Nations – not the Secretariat, but the nations themselves – and each individual nation has its own role to play. In terms of the Middle East, specifically the Israel-Palestine conflict, it must be the United States that pushes for a peace process, he argued. “The U.S. should choose Egypt as a partner, and it must stay doggedly on this issue for ten years – and not just the last year of each presidency,” he said. China, meanwhile, should be pushing for change in Burma, and South Africa has the most hope of success in Zimbabwe, according to Egeland.
He also emphasized the great importance of recognizing China and India as world powers. “It used to be,” said Egeland, “that we saw them as poor developing countries, and were satisfied when they verbally condemned something, but we didn’t press them to actually do something. Their days as passive bystanders are over.”
According to Egeland, 99 out of 100 humanitarian cases do not require military intervention and the responsibility to protect can be carried out through “sanctions, regional initiatives, carrots, sticks. There is a whole array of possibilities and they must be utilized, he said.
“I hope one day we will see the responsibility to protect put into practice,” Jessen-Petersen added, “but we haven’t seen it yet.” |
