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GPF List-Serve
Week of July 26 - 30, 1999
Greetings from GPF!
This week the United Nations Development Program held its first "Forum on Human Development" in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Human Development Report. GPF attended the opening session, which featured Secretary General Kofi Annan and a keynote by economist Amartya Sen of Cambridge University. Some of us attended further panels during the course of the three-day event. We have great respect for the Report and found the Conference quite stimulating, but we couldn't help noticing that of eighty-seven presenters in three days, not a single one was an NGO.
Most of the presenters were university professors and UN staff - people with lots of good things to say, to be sure. But the absence of NGO voices was quite shocking. We realized that the Human Development Report lacks connections to NGOs and their work. So we brought this lapse to the attention of Richard Jolly, the very capable and intelligent head of the HDR project when we ran into him at a reception on the evening of the first day. He looked surprised and astonished and said: "But there are a lot of NGOs here!" He meant in the audience, of course. Not exactly a convincing reply. So we shall follow up, in hopes that we can persuade him that NGOs have something serious to contribute to the thinking of the HDR team.
The conference included many tributes to the late Mahbub ul Haq, the inventive Pakistani economist who was Jolly's predecessor. Ul Haq came up with the idea of the Human Development Report and headed the team for the first five years. Sometime around 1995, ul Haq and virtually his entire team, including the respected Executive Director Inge Kaul, left the project en masse and were replaced by Jolly and a different team. We have always wondered why this change occurred, suspecting that it reflected political disputes in UNDP and member state pressure. If any reader knows details of this story, please let us know!
Back at GPF headquarters, we were busy with some important additions and innovations for our web site. Ben Holt designed some very handsome new buttons for our home page, including a striking image of a bee on a new button linking to the NGO section of the site. Ben and two colleagues also prepared twelve beautiful and informative new graphs -- on carbon tax, women and employment at the UN, communication and transportation costs, prisoners, internet usage, rates of mergers, armed conflicts, and development assistance. They also produced an important new graph that shows the large majority of poll respondents in the United States who support the United Nations and favor payment of the US arrears. We are very happy about these graphs and Ben promises to create quite a few more in the next couple of weeks. We expect to post a special page where all these graphs can be accessed in one place.
The global taxes section of the site was also rearranged this week, making it easier to use and understand. This long-planned change proved timely, since conservatives in the United States are once again attacking the United Nations for its alleged plans to impose a global tax on unsuspecting US citizens. The offense - a paragraph in the 1999 Human Development Report that suggests that a global tax be placed on email to help close the technological and educational disparity between the rich and the poor. We have monitored this controversy and have now posted several articles to the site about it.
While the black helicopter crowd fumes about global taxes, the Clinton administration has its own campaign of criticism aimed at the United Nations. This week, the administration let the press know that it was unhappy with the slow buildup of an effective UN-run civilian police force in Kosovo. The Pentagon accused the UN of dragging its feet and leaving much of the work to NATO troops in the region. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his representatives in Kosovo defended the UN's efforts, calling for an end to the finger-pointing and reminding the US that the mission's effectiveness depends on member states' contributions. By keeping UN funding at a perpetually low level, the US cynically insures that the UN can never adequately fulfill its mandates.
On Wednesday, the NGO Working Group on the Security Council had an informative meeting with Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock of the United Kingdom. From his comments and those of other delegates, we have learned that an intense effort is now under way among the Permanent members of the Council to negotiate a new resolution on Iraq. But there remains a deep divide between the United States on the one side and Russia and China on the other. The UK and France act as mediators in this process. Meanwhile, NGOs are losing their patience and are considering an international campaign to end the punitive Iraq sanctions.
One issue on the Council's agenda -- Angola sanctions -- is particularly of interest to GPF. So we are happy to report that the chair of the UN Sanctions Committee on Angola, Ambassador Robert Fowler, has spent July travelling in an effort to tighten sanctions imposed upon UNITA for its failure to abide by the Lusaka peace agreement. Ambassador Fowler visited Britain at the beginning of July where he met with British government officials and senior members of De Beers The Canadian Ambassador announced at a forum in London that he would be shortly naming the members of the two expert panels on how UNITA break sanctions. Sources suggest that the panels have been given one million dollars for their six-month investigation.
Ambassador Fowler has said that it would be very difficult to stop the 5-10 flights entering UNITA territory every evening carrying fresh supplies of arms and ammunition. However, he has raised the possibility of AWACs aircraft being used to monitor the flights as part of an attempt to interdict the sanction busters. This would require support from one of the "very few" countries possessing AWACs - probably the United States. We are glad to report that the US appears to be shifting its policy away from covert support for Savimbi.
Following his trip to Britain, Fowler visited the diamond cutting center of Antwerp, and was also due to visit Ukraine, which has been accused of being a major supplier of arms to UNITA. He attended the OAU summit in Algeria where it is reported that he recommended the deployment of up to 40 UN monitors in Southern Africa to help oversee the embargo. It was reported by the South African paper Business Day that the proposal was unanimously welcomed by the OAU summit.
This week, GPF said goodbye to summer intern Jessica Moffett of Princeton University, USA, who did an outstanding job working on our program on NGO access. At the same time, we welcomed Soo-hyung Lee of Ewha Women's University in Seoul, Korea, who will be working with us through the end of the year.
