Attending the opening of "Honoring the Heroes, Resisters and Survivors" exhibition at the UN were, from left, Ama Tutu Muna, Cameroon's culture minister; Michel Tommo Monthe, Cameroon's envoy to the UN; Anatolio Ndong Mba, UN envoy from Equatorial Guinea; and Tété António, the African Union envoy to the UN. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO

Three diplomats, from the United Nations missions of Jamaica, Pakistan and Uganda, were interviewed this spring by CUNY Graduate School of Journalism students. The diplomats focused on topics relevant to their countries and regions and spoke unscripted. The Ugandan ambassador responded to the video about Joseph Kony, the leader of the  brutal Lord’s Resistance Army, and where he might be hiding. The Pakistan envoy offered strong words on his country’s tensions over Afghanistan and the United States. And the Jamaican ambassador discussed his country’s role in a current exhibition at the UN commemorating the trans-Atlantic slave trade (closing June 10) as well as reports of homophobia in his country. The interviews have been edited for length.

Uganda

Adonia Ayebare is the Ugandan deputy ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet-level post.  Ayebare held the deputy UN ambassador post from 2005-2009 as well and was formerly ambassador to Rwanda and Burundi.  Before that, he was a journalist, covering East Africa for regional magazines and Irin, an news network that is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In addition, Ayebare worked as a consultant on East African peace and security issues for the International Crisis Group.

Q: How do you feel about the newfound interest in Joseph Kony, whose Lord’s Resistance Army militia group (LRA), terrorized northern Uganda for years, and about the related “Stop Kony 2012″ video that went viral this spring?

A: That question should be, Why they were not interested in him earlier? Yes, of course it takes time to attract interest, but finally it happened, huh?

Q: So do you look at the attention as positive or negative?

A: I don’t know. Of course you need perspective here. I think, of course, as you know, Kony is out of Uganda. It’s unfortunate that he’s causing problems elsewhere, in the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] and central Africa. I think people watching this, people who don’t know about Africa and who don’t know about central Africa in particular, they still think that the war is raging in Uganda, which is not true. He’s [Kony] out of Uganda but causing havoc, like I said, in the other states, Central African Republic.

Q: Is Joseph Kony a topic in your work at the UN?

A: Absolutely. The LRA is one of the things that we deal with every day at the government level, at the African Union and the UN.

Q: And that work was happening before the “Stop Kony 2012″ video?

A:  You know what, the “Kony 2012″ is completely not a new thing to us. We’re always meeting about it, trying to get a solution to the problem.

Q: As a former journalist, did you ever cover what Kony has done in the past?

A: I’m an old man. I used to be a journalist when there was Alice Lakwena [a Ugandan warrior mystic who led an insurgency in the 1980s], who preceded him. I never covered Kony.

Q: Do you think that the newfound interest in Kony will lead to his capture?

A: I hope so, but I don’t know. I think what is happening on the ground, the African Union has a strategy. You know, the African Union has coordinated the countries that are affected. People talk about the US military involvement. That is small compared to what the African Union is doing. The Union — Africans themselves — have been trying to capture him for a long time, and now there is a regional effort to do precisely that.

Q:  Yes, they’ve been working on it for a long time, and the US has been providing intelligence to the Uganda military for years and increased its role last year in tracking Kony down, but he still hasn’t been captured.

A: Not for a long time. The AU has just started doing it. It was being done by Uganda alone, and Congo and the Central African Republic coordinating together. But now, the African Union as a continent, as a whole, they’re just doing it a few months ago.

Q: So you’re optimistic that the new efforts will end in his capture?

A: It will, it will. – SARAH M. KAZADI

Pakistan

Abdullah Hussain Haroon has been Pakistan ambassador to the UN since 2008; his country sits on the UN Security Council as a nonpermanent member, having begun its two-year term in January. Haroon spoke about the war in Afghanistan and the US and its effect on his country.

Q: Obviously there’s been a crisis in Afghanistan for years, but this spring tensions seemed to rise to a new level, with the burning of the Koran by US soldiers, among other major troubles. What do you say about all that?

A: I would just say very quickly that if you read my speeches on Afghanistan in the Security Council and in the General Assembly, we always said that Afghanistan is a case study in international affairs where an intervening country can never succeed and has never succeeded historically. It is a case study for a country that does not submit to external will. Anyone who went in as a friend and did a lot for Afghanistan emerged as Enemy One. Take a look at recent times: the Russians went in in a big way; they left as enemies. The Americans went in in a big way; they left as enemies. The Pakistanis intervened; they became enemies. So you’re telling them you’re leaving and I kept telling the Security Council, when they know you’re leaving they come back more harshly at you. It’s the history of every retreat that takes place in Afghanistan. I don’t think that will change. The truth is, you went in, you didn’t meet your own expectations; your own commitments were not met.

Q: By ‘you,’ do you mean the United States?

A: Yes, of course, it’s all military. There may be some building of roads, some building of airbases, but the roads and airbases were used by the US for military purposes. You know the question is, Where’s the rest? O.K., so I think by their own standard, by their own formations, by their own assessments at every stage they have not achieved anything. What’s going to happen is very simple. There will never be peace in Pakistan until there is stability and peace in Afghanistan.

Q: How does Pakistan as a neighboring country feel about the circumstances in Afghanistan?

A: We are terrified. We’re the proverbial, shall we say, mother left with the unwanted child. I’m not referring to Afghanistan; I’m referring to the problem in Afghanistan. And that problem is dilution and devastation of its economy; the nonintegration of institution building into the infrastructure of the nation and the complete absence of a rule of law.

Q: What do you think is the best solution for the region now?

A: The best-case solution is for the Americans to take the Pakistanis into confidence. They will have to take Pakistan back into the equation and try with Pakistan to resolve those issues. We are starving as a nation; we have 40 percent aggregate energy absence, which needs to be rectified. People don’t have businesses anymore, people are dying for lack of financial generation. You say don’t take the energy from Iran, will you give it to us? No. Will you subsidize and get us oil from anywhere? No. What’s killing Pakistan? The pricing of oil.  — GWEN McCLURE

Jamaica

Raymond Wolfe, the Jamaican ambassador to the UN, has held this post since 2006. The country joined the UN in 1962 and has taken active roles in the creation of the Law of the Sea Treaty as well as environmental issues and the campaign against apartheid. Wolfe discussed the current multimedia exhibition at the UN, “Honoring the Heroes, Resisters and Survivors,” which marks the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, on March 25. The exhibition is displayed in the UN headquarters through June 10 and was organized by the UN, the African Union and the Caribbean Community, or Caricom.

Q: Can you tell me about the work you did on the exhibition honoring the victims of slavery during the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

A: Let me first start with the theme behind the memorial, acknowledging the tragedy, considering the legacy and lest we forget.  That is the theme which we adopted for the memorial. Jamaica came up with the idea — that there shouldn’t just be a commemorative event, there should be a lasting memorial at the United Nations, which the entire world could reflect on. Because first of all, slavery and the slave trade lasted for over 400 years, and even with the abolition of the slave trade, the lingering consequences still exist. We feel the international community should do something collectively about this. [Information on the design contest for a permanent memorial can be found here.]

Q: How did the idea for the slave-trade exhibition take shape?

A: We came together with the African Union but also formed partnerships with our former colonial powers to have this memorial erected at the UN.

Q: What did you have to do to get this at the UN?

A: In the context of the UN, decisions and resolutions are taken by the General Assembly. That provides a mandate for the UN to act on initiatives. So the first thing we had to do was to formulate a resolution, which was in 2008, calling for the erection of a monument at the UN. In subsequent resolutions, we updated the language to say that it should not just be a monument on the ground, but it should be on the plaza, a place of prominence, easily accessible to delegates, to visitors, to staff members, so it would have a permanent presence, where the world community is gathered.

Q: Why is the slave-trade exhibition important to the UN, to the surrounding communities and to Jamaica?

A: Well, 400 years of slavery without any atonement says a lot about what we need the international community to do. The legacy and consequences of slavery still exist with us today in the form of xenophobia, racial attitudes, hatred, racism, bigotry, xenophobia: all of these. The memorial should stand as a symbol and a reminder that this tragedy of such proportions should be allowed to happen ever again.

Q: Staying on the topic of humanitarian issues, Amnesty International has reported on homophobic attacks in Jamaica; can you tell me about that? What is the UN doing to address this issue?

A:  You can argue that there is some level of homophobia [in Jamaica], but our government is respectful of the rights of all citizens, and we don’t single out one group against the other. And when there are any cases of abuse against homosexuals, this is a violation against their basic human rights. And if those who carry out acts, they are subject to prosecution under the law.  If you look at what we said in our universal peer review at the Human Rights Council, our minister was very clear that we do not tolerate abuse against homosexuals in Jamaica. Right? Now you have to understand, we are a Christian country. There are certain fundamental views, so obviously Jamaicans will have strong views. But the issue of abuse is something that is not tolerated. I want to make it clear on behalf of my government that if wherever any acts should occur, those who have carried out those acts will be subject to prosecution under the law. —ERIN HORAN

In a Himalayan village in Nepal, Maheshwori Devi Bishwokarma, 19, is pregnant with her second child, who is in breach position. Instead of delivering the baby in a cow shed as planned, the mother was helped by a skilled birth attendant rather than an untrained traditional birth attendant. GATES FOUNDATION

As the annual stocktaking on the progress of the Millennium Development Goals begins ahead of the next General Assembly session, there has been good news about the reduction in deaths of infants and children under age 5. But bright spots on the global map are not enough to ensure that Goal 4 can be met by the 2015 deadline. At the moment that looks unlikely.

Goal 4 calls for reducing under-5 mortality by two-thirds from the baseline year of 1990 to 2015. So far, a 35 percent drop has occurred, according to a 2011 report by a United Nations consortium, the Interagency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. The good news is that about 12,000 fewer children are dying every day, and the rate of decline is accelerating steadily, meaning more lives saved. In numerical terms, under-5 deaths declined to an estimated 7.6 million by 2010 from 12 million in 1990, even while populations rose.

Among the bright spots, 14 developing countries – of the 66 that once had under-5 mortality rates above 40 deaths in 1,000 live births — reduced their death rates by half or more between 1990 and 2010. Six of them – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Laos, Madagascar, Nepal and Timor-Leste — cut under-5 death rates by 60 percent or more. Regionally, North Africa and East Asia recorded the biggest overall drops of nearly two-thirds, ready to meet the Millennium Goal target on time.

The shadows being cast over this otherwise brightening picture are the persistently high rates in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and China, the UN consortium said in the Millennium Development Goals Report 2011 and an addendum update.

“About 70 percent of the world’s under-five deaths occurred in only 15 countries,” the UN said, “and about half in only five countries, by magnitude: India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and China. India (22 percent) and Nigeria (11 percent) together account for a third of under-five deaths worldwide.” India, where the population is still growing, will be the world’s most populous nation in little more than a decade, the UN Population Division estimates. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, the continent with the highest fertility rates.

In India, where government statistics are very reliable and many programs have been introduced to improve the lives of the poor in communities, India’s high under-5 death rate is the subject of critical reporting in the media and admonitions from government officials who blame failures or corruption at state and local levels to carry out projects.

In a speech on May 19 in Srinagar, the summer capital of the disputed region of Kashmir, claimed by both India and Pakistan and scene of a long-running separatist movement on the Indian-administered side, the federal family welfare minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, called a spate of infant deaths at a leading local hospital “a matter of shame,” India’s Business Standard newspaper reported. In March, Azad reported to the upper house of the Indian Parliament that the country’s infant mortality rate was 46 per 1,000 births — “worse than those of Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh,” he said.

India’s registrar general, the head of the national census, collected data on the causes of child deaths, and the findings appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2010. The results offer a window to understanding under-5 deaths not only in India but also in other developing countries where death rates are not decreasing to meet Goal 4. The need for comprehensive reproductive health care becomes obvious.

The Indian study found three leading causes of death among newborns: prematurity and low birth weight, neonatal infections and birth asphyxia or trauma. Among all under-fives, the two main causes of death were pneumonia and diarrhea diseases. Cultural factors also played a major role in the deaths of little girls, who in a region where the status of women is not high were five times more likely to die of pneumonia and four times more likely to die of diarrhea diseases than boys in comparative groups elsewhere.     

The UN report reflects these findings and adds others from different regions of the world. Globally, the UN interagency group said, the leading killers were the same: pneumonia, diarrhea-related disease, birth complications and birth asphyxia. It added malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and pointed to undernutrition as a factor in many developing countries.

Among the numerous nongovernmental organizations also working on projects to reduce under-5 mortality, Save the Children focuses on a campaign it calls “the first 1,000 days,” from the beginning of a mother’s pregnancy to the child’s second birthday. In a recent report, State of the World’s Mothers 2012, Save the Children said: “The right nutrition during this window can have a profound impact on a child’s ability to grow, learn and rise out of poverty.” Effects of malnutrition at birth may be irreversible.

The report estimated that malnutrition is the underlying cause of 2.6 million child deaths a year, and that those who survive may be mentally and physically impaired for life. Mothers and  babies need good nutrition, but “complex social and cultural beliefs in many developing countries put females at a disadvantage and, starting from a very young age, many girls do not get enough to eat.”

Once again, the interlinked nature of many or perhaps most of the Millennium Goals is apparent. Undernourished girls, perhaps given away as child brides, give birth too young to another generation of malnourished children. Maybe it is time to start rethinking the goals as all dependent on the status of women as the crucial factor in human development. Political will is needed to back strategies for enhancing the lives of women and girls. “Economic growth is not enough to fight malnutrition,” Save the Children says.

This article is the third in a series assessing the status of the Millennium Development Goals.

Additional resources

Nagging Hunger Undermines Millennium Poverty Goal

Scrutinizing Millennium Goal Claims as 2015 Looms

The Spotlight Returns to Family Planning

Kai Eide, left, a Norwegian diplomat who was a special envoy and chief of the UN mission in Afghanistan, stopping at a Kabul polling station in 2009. FARDIN WAEZI/UNAMA

The Norwegian diplomat, Kai Eide, left Afghanistan for the final time in March 2010, as the United Nations special representative and head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for two years. With former postings as a UN special envoy in Kosovo and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as a Norwegian ambassador to NATO and to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Eide brought real depth to his role in Kabul.

Yet there are few places as challenging as Afghanistan – ethnically and geographically diverse, with the highest global infant and maternal mortality rates in the world – and the country presented Eide and the international community with entrenched and complex security, governmental and humanitarian problems. Unfortunately, the challenges seem even more intractable with the pending withdrawal of NATO forces by the end of 2014.

Afghanistan has a history of being “conquered” by outside invaders, who failed to hang on to the territory for long. In modern-day Afghanistan, the problems are just as unyielding: maintaining security while improving the country’s governance, building up its infrastructure and developing national and local institutions. The paradox of the Afghanistan situation, as Eide intimates in his recent book, “Power Struggle Over Afghanistan: An Inside Look at What Went Wrong – and What We Can Do to Repair the Damage,” is that although international money has poured in, it is often the donor governments’ lack of understanding of the country that has led to enormous inefficiencies and flaws in these good intentions.

“As a result of our inability to understand the country and therefore formulate workable strategies, support for our engagement in Afghanistan has declined,” Eide writes in the book. “We are trapped between an impatient public and a growing insurgency in a country where quick fixes do not exist.”

Eide, who left the UN posts in Afghanistan amid controversy over his role in the presidential election in 2009, continues to describe a further paradox in the country’s security conundrum – increasingly supporting the efforts of the administration of President Hamid Karzai to take on the country’s security mantle while trying to keep security from deteriorating further.

During Eide’s time in Afghanistan, high levels of international money poured into the country, but it was also a period of an increase in what Eide calls “donor-generated fragmentation.” That is, funds were increasingly tied to the provinces and locales where a donor country concentrated its military assets. Eide feared a knock-on effect that “when the countries’ contributing troops started to withdraw their forces, they would also reduce their economic investment if their military and development engagements were too intertwined.” The full extent of the manifestations of this fear will not be known until 2015 and well beyond.

Applauded and criticized in equal measures for taking a lead on engaging with the Taliban, Eide reiterates throughout the book that a lasting peace in Afghanistan can be countenanced only after talking, engaging and negotiating with the Taliban hierarchy. He also repeatedly warns of the gross oversimplification in certain international quarters of the Taliban being simply “bad guys.” Saying that many Taliban members joined the insurgency for economic reasons, Eide discusses the frustration of having $500 million pledged at the 2010 London Conference (primarily by Japan and the United States) to finance the reintegration of Taliban leaders and fighters, but that “one year after it was established, very few Taliban had come forward to make use of the fund and little money had been dispersed.”

Indeed, Eide says “there were even rumours of Taliban fighters who had tried to be integrated, but found that nobody was ready to receive them and provide support that had been promised.”

"Power Struggle Over Afghanistan," by Kai Eide.

Fundamentally, Eide cites an abject failure by the international community – citing the US and European powers specifically – to comprehend the importance of tradition, religion and culture to the variety of groups in the country. With most international administrators and officials working exclusively from Kabul, while most of the Afghan population lives and works outside the capital by farming, he could well have a point.

Short-termism on the part of the international community, however, could be the overwhelming reason for failure, Eide suggests. By targeting funds, he says, the right kind of infrastructure could be built up to provide a foundation for future economic growth and long-term stability; Afghanistan’s potential mineral wealth alone has been estimated at $1 trillion.

NATO intelligence failures, lack of Western sensitivity regarding Afghan culture and failures on coordination of UN resources are all mentioned frequently in the book as continuing weaknesses in the international strategy toward Afghanistan. Yet perhaps even less time is devoted to corruption and disorganization within the country, Eide says. Although he was lambasted by some for his closeness at times to the Afghan president, and one of his most vociferous critics was his own deputy, Peter Galbraith, an American, Eide retains a remarkable respect for Karzai that is evident throughout the book as he perceives Karzai as crucial to Afghanistan’s future.

Eide writes: “A solution to Afghanistan’s conflict will … have to be found before the end of Karzai’s second term [in 2014]. He knows Afghanistan better than any other Afghan politician I have met. And he has a profound sense of duty toward his country. A successful exit strategy will depend on our ability to see him as a partner, to work with him, and not against him.”

Whether Eide is correct remains to be seen. Yet in this remarkably frank account of his time in the country, he paints a picture of a complex, divided place with players inside and out seeking to build a nation, escape a mire or maintain instability. Eide leaves us, however, with a semblance of hope, albeit with a caveat: “It is easy to despair and believe that the conflict in Afghanistan is a lost war and that Afghanistan itself is a failed state that cannot be repaired. I do not agree … but if the international community leaves prematurely, then many of those who can modernise Afghanistan will decide to leave as well.”

 Additional resources

Easing Afghan Women’s Burdens With a Hotline

A New Envoy, Slovakian, Heads to Afghanistan

The US urged nuclear-capable countries to "exercise restraint" while it also praised India's "solid nonproliferation record" after the country tested a nuclear missile on April 16, 2012. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, above, greets Javed Ashraf, an Indian external affairs minister, at New Delhi on May 7, 2012.

Asia was the setting last month for two completely different missile tests. North Korea‘s, on April 13, was a total failure yet drew strong condemnation in the region, around the world and by the United Nations. The fear now is that North Korea could cover its embarrassment by doing another nuclear test, and indeed on May 17 it was reported to have resumed building another nuclear reactor that could be used to enlarge its weapons program.

India‘s test of an intermediate-range ballistic missile on April 16 was fully successful and puts Beijing, Shanghai and parts of Europe in range of Indian nukes. Hailed by most Indian analysts as a game-changer, the Agni-V was dubbed the “China killer” by the more excitable commentators.

Washington urged all nuclear-capable states to “exercise restraint,” praised India’s “solid nonproliferation record” and noted its “very strong strategic and security partnership.” NATO said India was not a threat. Only China’s media delivered a rebuke, albeit a gentle one that reminded Indians of China’s nuclear superiority.

A major collateral benefit for India is the growing world recognition that the prime impetus behind its nuclear policy is China. The range, mobility and “MIRVability” —  many warheads mounted on a single missile aimed at different targets — of the Agni-V guarantees a survivable, second-strike retaliatory ability even if India is hit by a surprise nuclear attack and gives credence to its no-first-use policy.

Significantly, just before the launching, the Indian Navy commissioned a nuclear-powered attack submarine, called the Chakra, and began trials of the nuclear-powered Arihant.

India also bolstered its claims to join the global nonproliferation regimes like the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement. But other countries resist India’s joining  because it is not party to the Nonproliferation  Treaty and still refuses to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Increasingly, however, the effectiveness of the control regimes will be diluted without India’s membership.

The different reactions to the missile launchings by North Korea and by India indicate that the world is at last confronting long-suppressed contradictions in the assumptions about global nuclear threats. The Nonproliferation Treaty contains a three-way bargain that privileges the interests of the nuclear “haves” who drafted and negotiated the pact. The nonnuclear countries were allowed access to technology and material to harness nuclear energy for civilian and development use, if they foreswore any plans to get the bomb. The nuclear “haves” promised to give up their own nuclear weapons “eventually,” they contend.

The nonproliferation requirement to civilian and development purposes was precise, legally binding, verifiable by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and enforceable by the UN Security Council (where the permanent-five members, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, are nuclear “haves”). The disarmament promise, however, was vague, voluntary, not subject to verification and unenforceable. The imbalance has grown worse over the decades as the treaty has been subverted from a prohibition into a nonproliferation regime.

The treaty’s assumption is that the destructiveness of nuclear weapons makes them uniquely evil and that they should be banned for everyone. Those who had them were given time to transit out of their national security’s dependence on the bomb. Those who did not have them were banned from ever getting them.

The public rhetoric is not matched by private concerns. When pressed away from the cameras, no one claims that 100 to 300 bombs in British and French hands is a serious threat to others. In North Korean and Iranian hands, they would cause grave anxiety to the rest of the region. Reflecting Arab and non-Arab and Shiite-Sunni sectarian divisions, Middle Eastern countries are more acutely worried by a possible Iranian bomb than an actual Israeli bomb. India’s bomb does not cause the same international migraine as Pakistan’s.

A Russian Navy Pacific fleet submarine equipped with ballistic missiles returns home after exercises.

The worry is that regimes that are treated harshly may resent the perceived double standards and intensify efforts to strengthen nuclear weapons programs they may have going. The bottom line is that the logic of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament are essentially the same. The possession of nuclear weapons by some is the biggest stimulus to their proliferation to others. If they did not exist, they could not proliferate. Because they do, they will.

That is, possession by some is a sufficient guarantee of proliferation to others; the only details to be worked out are when, to whom and how many. Conversely, nuclear disarmament by all is a necessary condition for nonproliferation. The drive for nonproliferation will be credible only if nuclear disarmament is pursued with matching determination and urgency.

The challenge is not about nuclear abolition per se, but about how and when it should occur, so that we do not tip into fatal nuclear, or conventional major-power, wars.  The related challenge is to ensure that around 30 countries that take shelter under the nuclear umbrella do not feel so alarmed at the prospect of nuclear disarmament by their protectors that they get the bomb themselves.

Neither instant nuclear disarmament nor one postponed to a forever-distant date will work. Rather, a carefully choreographed movement from 20,000 nuclear warheads around the world today to global zero within a realistic time frame is possible. As Russia and the US possess more than 90 percent of the existing arsenal, the onus is on them to lead the way.

On May 16, Gen. James Cartwright, the former chief of the US Strategic Command, dropped a bombshell by arguing that the US and, by implication, Russia, could cut its deployed strategic warheads by two-thirds, to 450, and its reserve warheads by nearly 90 percent to 450 as well. This action could be done over the next decade while the US still meets its national security requirements for itself and its allies.

That is the kind of dramatic leadership we need now.

Additional resources

 Counting the Nuclear Weapons of US and Russia

A literacy project for locally elected officials in Burkina Faso is financed by the UN Development Program. A world-renown economist argues that the UN agency is using dated policies. GIACOMO PIROZZI/UNDP

In a broadside against the United Nations Development Program, Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics at Columbia University and an adviser to the government of India and numerous international bodies, argues that the UN’s premier agency has declined in staff quality as it clings to outdated policies that actually harm poor countries.

At the heart of his argument, in an interview for the International Peace Institute’s Global Observatory, an online magazine, Bhagwati, who is also a senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, reignites the controversy over diverging views on development in the global North and South.

He is concerned that antimarket, antireform forces have captured a wider audience than that of the post-colonial economic thinkers, who argued against policies for economic and institutional growth promoted by the industrial countries. The old antimarketers and their contemporary followers have called for a new global economic order in which redistribution of wealth, rather than the creation of wealth, should be the top priority. They oppose stringent reforms of government policies and programs that are often demanded by the International Monetary Fund or other institutions, such as reducing or ending subsidies that prop up certain economic sectors like agriculture or hold down living costs for the poor.

Critics like Bhagwati counter that tough reforms and productive investment choices, not temporary palliatives or handouts, are what stimulate long-term sustainable development.

The issue of how growth and development are best achieved  is also a theme in the critique of the often ineffective UN Economic and Social Council, by Paul Kennedy in his 2006 book, “The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations.” Tracking the issue historically, Kennedy wrote: “Put crudely, the “have nots” (the South), encouraged by the socialist bloc and First World radicals, were challenging the “haves” (the North and its institutions) about the existing balance of economic power. Distribution, not growth, was back on the agenda.”

Bhagwati said in the interview for the Global Observatory, which ranged over many development policy issues, that the UN Development Program had fallen into the trap of thinking that putting a priority on economic growth was wrong, in large part because it resulted in imposed prescriptions that hurt nonmarket sectors like health, education or other social programs.

Jagdish Bhagwati, an economics professor at Columbia and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“What they didn’t realize was that growth was an instrumental variable, as we put it in economics,” he said. “It was not the objective of policy.” Economic growth, in other words, could benefit all aspects of national life, given good governance and wise policy choices. “You’ve got to have rapid growth before we can impact on poverty,” he  said.

“And so I think the UNDP [was] under the influence of people like Mahbub ul Haq [the late creator of the UN's Human Development Report] and Amartya Sen [an Indian development economist and Nobel prize winner] “who were actually bringing the Indian ideas from the 50′s and 60′s” to the UN agency, Bhagwati said, referring to a period when India had a controlled protectionist economy but also a strong democracy.

“So I think they wound up locking UNDP into a set of attitudes which then made out like growth was no good.” He thinks the same people had some influence with World Bank presidents, “particularly later on when Jim Wolfensohn came in.”

Bhagwati had some positive words for the World Bank, which he views as more effective and staffed with more expertise than UNDP, since  Helen Clark, the agency’s chief, he noted, has no experience in development.

He also had advice for the bank’s new president, Jim Yong Kim, a health expert from Dartmouth College.  Bhagwati said Kim should set himself up with “a number of really first-rate advisers who are not just conventional development economists, who are willing to look at what is actually happening on the world in terms of the kinds of things you were against in 2000 … and see and learn for yourself how good some of these reforms really are, how inclusive they’ve been and how they interact very nicely with politics of democracy.”

Leaders of both the World Bank and the UN Development Program “have to be open to new ideas,” Bhagwati added. “So I think we need leadership. We need continuous feedback from the evolving experience. And unfortunately both in the bank and the UNDP, the ideas about development are really unwittingly calculated to harm the developing countries. I hope some of these messages get through.”

 Additional resources

  In Washington, a Seasoned Hand at the UN’s Development Office

Nagging Hunger Undermines Millennium Poverty Goal

Scrutinizing Millennium Goal Claims as 2015 Looms

Guinea-Bissau military police guard the streets of the capital before the presidential election in March 2012. JOE PENNEY.

DAKAR, Senegal — The fate of Guinea-Bissau hangs on precariously as regional and international bodies involved in resolving the country’s post-coup crisis, which forestalled a presidential run-off vote, disagree about pace and tactics. The complications from the coup and another recent government overthrow, in Mali, have created unease throughout West Africa, possibly the last place on earth where countries still succumb to rogue actions by military personnel and other violent threats to the rule of law.

The potential for a domino effect in the region cannot be overlooked, one analyst said. Two other countries in the area are recovering from horrific civil wars (Liberia and Sierra Leone); Ivory Coast suffered through a hijacked presidential election; Guinea’s president, Alpha Condé, survived an assassination hit last year while introducing security sector reform; and Nigeria is under almost daily attack by radical militants.

On the other hand, Ghana is considered progressive and Senegal carried out a presidential vote without tremendous strife. A UN Security Council trip to Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone on May 21 should provide more insight into its handling of the current problems.

The coups only hurt the region.”There is little doubt that the military throughout Africa are looking in other African countries, checking out how much coupists can get away with,” said Vincent Foucher, a senior analyst in Dakar, Senegal, with the International Crisis Group. That makes it more essential, he said in an e-mail to PassBlue, that a solution does not suggest a “junta victory.”

Despite condemnation from the Security Council soon after the April 12 coup and negotiations so far, “no results have yet been achieved that can help the people of Guinea-Bissau return to constitutional normality,” Georges Chikoti, an Angolan foreign minister who runs the Community of Portuguese-Language Countries (CPLP), said at a May 7 UN briefing.

Even the purpose of the UN Peacebuilding Commission, which has a mandate in Guinea-Bissau to prevent conflicts, has been questioned. Sean Harder, a media program officer with the Stanley Foundation, wrote in a newsletter that some experts wonder whether the commission’s agenda in the country was a “wise investment of resources.” (The commission chairwoman of the Guinea-Bissau program is the Brazilian ambassador to the UN, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, whose country is also on the Security Council.)

The UN briefing reviewed an update on Guinea-Bissau, a Portuguese-speaking country where people earn about $17 a month. Those who spoke described the nation as a free-falling state, where many government officials and others remain jailed or in hiding; the price of cashews, the main export, is dropping; freedom of speech and assembly are curtailed; and public funds and government offices are pillaged by the military.

Since the briefing, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), led by Nigeria, has applied some short-term fixes to the crisis as the group also troubleshoots in Mali, a larger country with insurgencies overrunning half its territory.

Carlos Gomes Jr., the presidential front-runner, at at his home in Bissau, the capital, before the first round of elections. His house was attacked by heavy weapons the night of the coup on April 12, 2012. JOE PENNEY

Ecowas said it was organizing a Nigerian-Burkina Faso peacekeeping force to send to Guinea-Bissau and announced the choice of an interim president, Manuel Serifo Nhamadjo, ruling out for now the reinstatement of the two ousted political leaders, Carlos Gomes Jr., the presidential front-runner, and the interim president, Raimundo Pereira. (Ecowas arranged their release and safe haven in Ivory Coast.)

Naming an interim president is one source of friction among the negotiators, who besides Ecowas include the African Union, the United Nations, the European Union and the CPLP. Some contend it validates the junta and that Gomes should not be excluded from discussions.

Meanwhile, the Security Council said it may consider imposing sanctions against people involved in the coup if the situation is not resolved, though no deadline was set. Sanctions against the junta leaders — travel bans and asset freezes — have been imposed by Ecowas, the European Union and the CPLP.

Guinea-Bissau, abutting the Atlantic Ocean, has just 1.6 million people; besides a history of coups, it is more recently known as a transit hub for South American cocaine trafficking to Western and Central Europe. Yet the country has such potential minerals as bauxite, diamond, gold, heavy minerals, oil and phosphate rock.

At the UN briefing, Chikoti, the Angolan, said the drug trafficking was a major motivation for the coup. Another international official in the capital, Bissau, said during the first presidential vote, in March, that the coup occurred to distract people from a big drug shipment.

But cocaine seizures have been made in other sites on the West Africa coast, and in Guinea-Bissau it is “just one more prize and one more resource in a complex political game that has a deeper history,” Foucher said. The history of the relationship between the military and the civilians and the country’s ruling party (known as the PAIGC) and democratization also play a part. Moreover, the military is dominated by the Balanta ethnic group, so reforming the armed forces instills distrust in that community toward the government.

The country’s politicians and military, however, use the cocaine accusations “to get at one another, because it is the ultimate scarlet letter in the eyes of the international community,” Foucher noted. Recent reports suggest that the junta, or those within the junta, have been arranging new cocaine deliveries to finance the coup and “foot the wage bill of the armed forces,” Foucher added.

The coup occurred weeks shy of the April 29 run-off election between Gomes, a former prime minister, and Kumba Yala, a once-deposed president. On the day of the first election in March, an ex-military intelligence official was shot dead near his home, sowing valid suspicions that a coup would ensue.

Yet the UN, which is invested in security-sector reform in the country as well as a transnational crime partnership, seemed to have been taken aback by the junta’s move on April 12.

The Security Council Report, an independent information source, said that  a possible  coup was raised on April 5 by Kadré Désiré Ouédraogo, president of the Ecowas commission. He  wrote a letter to the UN secretary-general about “disturbing developments that could jeopardise” the run-off vote.

His letter cited the “mounting suspicion and tension” between Guinea-Bissau’s military and the Angolan Technical Military Assistance Mission in the country, providing help stabilization support but not entirely welcomed by Guinean army officers. (The team is still in the country.)

In addition, Gomes’s winning position was a cause of concern for some military members, who feared that if he became president, he would carry out reforming the armed forces, which are considered bloated and aging and said to participate in the drug trade.

Manuel Serifo Nhamadjo, center, in Bissau. He has been named interim president. JOE PENNEY

Gomes also wrote to the UN secretary-general, on April 9, asking the Security Council to consider sending a peacekeeping force “to be charged with extensive powers aimed at the maintenance of political stability in the country.” But the Security Council did not know about the two letters until after the coup, because the secretary-general apparently forwarded the letters on April 23, the Security Council Report said.

Since then, the UN  integrated peace-building mission in the country advised the Security Council to send “training and protection units” and a peacekeeping or stabilization force. But one diplomat on the council told PassBlue that installing a full-fledged mission was remote.

While aggressive outside intervention is unlikely soon and sanctions have a dubious effect, Foucher said, it will take a “united international community to make it clear to the junta that they have little wriggling space.” Tensions between Ecowas and the CPLP do not help, as Ecowas feels that Angola is trespassing and should leave the region.

The squabbling among the parties also erodes credibility with the junta. As Foucher said, “International coordination is a priority,” and it should be the role of the UN and the African Union, he added, to manage the transitions to democracy.

“Given the tension between Ecowas and CPLP and the relative lack of interest and commitment of other players, it is not surprising that the UN have been having a hard time building a solid consensus and get things on the move,” he said. “A real pity in such a tiny, aid-dependent workable country.”

Reporting was contributed by Dulcie Leimbach in New York.

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Zoya Phan, left, a Burmese dissident who lives in England, doubts the sincerity of the government's new openness toward democratic reform.

GENEVA — The victory of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Myanmar dissident, in winning a seat in Parliament has indicated a rapid shift toward democratic reform in the country. But Zoya Phan, a longstanding advocate for the Karen ethnic group in Myanmar, is cautious about the developments.

Phan was here attending the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, a meeting organized by nonprofit groups and independent of the United Nations Human Rights Council. She discussed the decades-long human rights abuses committed by the military junta in her country against ethnic groups like hers and anyone else who easily ran afoul of the military, which has dominated power since a 1962 coup. The abuses include torture, extrajudicial killings, political arrests and use of child soldiers. Phan hopes the rest of the world will stay vigilant to the changes in Myanmar (also called Burma) as the government seems to back away from civilian repression.

“For many decades, my people have been under attack by the government,” said Phan, a slight woman who lives in Britain but is originally from Manerplaw, the Karens’ initial home base on the hilly Thai border, an area cultivated for rice and a base for pro-democracy battles against the military government. Both her parents were deeply involved in the movement. “We had to run for our lives.” A Karen resistance movement is older than the original Burma itself.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon traveled to Myanmar in the last six months to assess the country’s re-entry into the global arena as it seeks to end sanctions imposed by international bodies. Yet recent reports by human rights groups suggest that President Thein Sein and the military, controlled by ethnic Burmese, remains hostile to ethnic minority groups like the Karen.

The Karen, who are multireligious, make up 7 percent of the country’s population of about 55 million; a large number  remain exiled, mostly living in Thailand in refugee camps. Phan fled there in her early teens with her family and described life in the camps as prison-like, because they were not allowed to leave. Her family subsisted on little food and basic supplies.

After spending more than 10 years as a refugee, Phan sought political asylum in Britain in 2007 and was admitted to the country in 2005. (She was educated, meanwhile, at a university in Bangkok through a grant from the Open Society Institute.) In 2009, she became a TED fellow, recognized for her activism on behalf of the Karen, and in 2010, she was honored as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum. The author of a memoir (with Damien Lewis), “Undaunted: My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma,” Phan’s account of an exiled dissident family torn apart by political unrest, she acknowledges the positive changes happening in Myanmar but thinks it is just the start of a “long, long, long way to walk.”

“The government in Burma,” she said, “is very much worried about their international image. Although the government has released some political prisoners, they are only interested in international legitimacy and in removing the economic sanctions and do not care about democracy and human rights.”

Phan said the government was still committed to censoring people. Myanmar ranks 169 out of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Another nonprofit group, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which was founded by Burmese dissidents, reports about 1,000 cases of verified and unverified political prisoners being held by the government for opposing the rule of law by the military. In recent weeks, hundreds have been released yet many remain jailed with no due legal process.

The country’s failure to adopt new technologies broadly has hindered the spread of information. Only several hundred thousand people have access to electricity, and from those, very few use the Internet, Phan said.

“People don’t have computers, mobile phones are very expensive, and if they do need the Internet they go to the cafes, which are very monitored by government spies.”

Once skeptical of the electoral process, Phan is more upbeat now that Aung San Suu Kyi has joined the Parliament with dozens of others from her political party. But Phan stressed that political negotiations must continue after the sanctions are lifted.

“If there is only a cease-fire and without political solutions, it is like pressing a pause button and not a stop button,” she said. “It only tackles the symptoms of the problems, not the root causes of the problems.”

Phan said she would continue to fight for minority rights in Myanmar, although she is not welcome inside. She works daily to promote political awareness for the Burma Campaign UK and is a founding member of the Phan Foundation, a nonprofit group set up by her family (both parents are dead) and dedicated to education and the alleviation of poverty for the Karen in Myanmar.

Although the government has given the world a glimpse of new openness to democracy, Phan said she did not foresee serious reform but only cosmetic fixes. “When we look at the dictatorship, their repressive laws have yet to be repealed,” she said. “The government does not want to talk about genuine peace.”

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Mirhab tower, above, of the Sankoré mosque. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

Stairs of the Dyingerey Ber mosque. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

Sankoré, built in the 15th century. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

Sankoré is notable for its large pyramid. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

Traditional maintenance work on the tower. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

Workmen repair the mud-brick structure. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

The projecting torons are used as scaffolding. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

The mosque's exterior faces a Timbuktu street. Franscesco Bandarin/Unesco

A collection of ancient manuscripts. Lazare Eloundou Assomo/Unesco

A closeup view. Lazare Eloundou Assomo/Unesco

"Biography of the Prophet," a 17th century copy. Lazare Eloundou Assomo/Unesco

Detail of illuminations and colored text in the Moroccan style.

Timbuktu has been a Unesco World Heritage site since 1988; the UN agency condemned the damage to the tombs, which total 333 throughout the city’s 16 cemeteries and mausoleums, all preserved through the Unesco designation. The fully destroyed tomb held the remains of a local Muslim saint, Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar, and was reportedly torn apart and burned.

A Unesco team from Paris is traveling to Bamako, Mali’s capital, on May 18 to discuss a strategy with the UN officials there and the government to deal with the vulnerability of Timbuktu, Lazare Eloundou Assomo, chief of Unesco’s Africa unit, told PassBlue.

“The desecration affected the identity of the people,” Eloundou said of the destroyed tomb, adding that they were “upset.”

Unesco is also concerned about the fate of the city’s 200,000 medieval manuscripts, which are normally kept in private and public hands but have been hidden since the invasion. The Unesco director-general, Irina Bokova, sent an appeal in April to relevant officials in Mali, neighboring countries, Interpol and the art world to be on the lookout for the sale of the manuscripts on the black market.

The documents represent the city’s flourishing trade in buying and exchanging books — on subjects ranging from astronomy to medicine — during its heyday from the 13th to 15th centuries, when students came from Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in Africa to study as Timbuktu also traded in gold from the south and salt from the north as well as slaves. Eloundou said that the oldest manuscript he has seen dates from the ninth century.

Mali and its neighbors are bound to a Unesco convention protecting cultural properties, and Mali itself is a party to The Hague convention for protection of cultural goods during armed conflicts. Unesco has not heard back from officials so far about manuscripts being sold.

Timbuktu has been more of a tourist shrine than an intellectual powerhouse in recent history, but since the Tuareg rebels and Islamic extremists have seized the city, few media professionals have ventured there to report firsthand on its status, given the rash of kidnappings in the region and violence. The Unesco team, for example, will not be going to Timbuktu.

The slide show presented here by PassBlue displays photos of the ancient mud-brick mosques in Timbuktu and copies of medieval manuscripts.

Amilcar Cabral's childhood home in the small town of Bafata, Guinea-Bissau, is being turned into a museum with help from Unesco. MIRVA LEMPIAINEN

BAFATÁ, Guinea-Bissau — On a quiet sandy street in this small town, amid old houses with their paint peeling off, stands one unfittingly polished white and pink building. It’s the newly renovated childhood home of freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral, the Che Guevara of Guinea-Bissau.

The house where Cabral lived from his birth, in 1924, to 1932 underwent a $15,000 renovation last year, financed by Unesco. The historical building is now being turned into a museum.

Bafatá is about a two-hour drive from Bissau, the capital, which went into lockdown mode in April when the military staged a coup, just one of many juntas that have overthrown the government since the country became independent from Portugal, with Cabral’s leadership, in 1974. The junta made its move just weeks before a presidential election run-off. Though little bloodshed occurred, the country remains in a precarious state and several government officials remain in hiding or have been jailed.

Nevertheless, the renovation of Cabral’s house is meant to honor one  of Africa’s big heroes, who fought to free Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, an island off the West African coast, from the colonial grip of Portugal. With his half-brother Luís, Cabral founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in 1956, known as Paigc (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde).

The interior of the Cabral house, which includes dozens of photos of the hero, who was killed in 1973, less than a year before his country gained independence from Portugal. MIRVA LEMPIAINEN

The museum’s opening is scheduled for Jan. 13, 2013, the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Cabral in 1973 in Conakry, Guinea, where he is buried. He was shot by dissident members of Paigc, in a plot orchestrated by the Portuguese government that went awry. (The goal was to arrest him.) Thus Cabral never got to see the fruits of his labor— both Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde gaining their independence the same year. One can only imagine how he might feel about his country’s latest escapade.

“This will be the first Cabral museum in the world,” said Policarpo Marco Lopes, the executive secretary of Unesco in Guinea-Bissau. “Guineans are very happy about this project.”

Lopes believes that Cabral’s early home will become a major tourist attraction for international and domestic visitors —presumably after resolution of the coup, which ousted the interim president, Raimundo Pereira, and the prime minister and presidential candidate, Carlos Gomes Jr. Both were released by the junta and sent to Ivory Coast as a regional group, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), the United Nations and others negotiate with the military for the country’s return to constitutional rule.

‘You can do it again’

Meanwhile, the long-term plan for Bafatá, at least, is to upgrade the entire neighborhood.

“We need to renovate the other historical houses and build a library, cultural centers and artisanal markets,” Lopes said. The money to do this, he said, will hopefully come from South Africa.

Lopes said that South African delegates visited Bafatá a few months ago and expressed their interest in helping develop Guinea-Bissau, one of the world’s poorest nations. The World Bank reports that the average salary in 2007 was just $17 a month.

“Guinea-Bissau is a country of the future, not today,” Lopes said, citing a potential for tourism. “But one day Guinea-Bissau will be doing better.” The tropical island group of Bijagós just off the coast is a Unesco biosphere reserve and draws more visitors each year, especially to fish, which are plentiful and exotic.

One reason Unesco financed the renovation of the Cabral house was to offer hope for the country’s well-being and remind Guineans of their heyday, said Gorka Gamarra, a former liaison officer of Unesco in Guinea-Bissau.

“The most important event for this country in this century was gaining its independence,” he said. “And the leader of the war was Amílcar Cabral.”

Cabral with an unidentified baby.

The museum’s message to Guineans is simple, Gamarra said: “You did it before —you can do it again.”

Whether Guineans believe they actually succeeded in creating a free and independent country is another matter altogether, as some controversy surrounding Cabral’s true origins linger. While born and raised in Bafatá, his parents came from Cape Verde, where he moved at age 8 with his family. Cabral was more light-skinned than most Guineans, which may be a result of the historical mixing of Portuguese colonizers and their African slaves on Cape Verde.

He waited to move back to Guinea-Bissau at age 28, a fact that causes many Guineans to think that Cabral was not a local hero at all. Gamarra said such talk was nonsense.

“Amílcar Cabral is a part of the history of this country,” he said. “He is one of the fathers of this country.”

Iva Cabral, 58, the daughter of Cabral, said she was tired of people saying her father was not from Guinea-Bissau.

“My father considered himself to be both Guinean and Cape Verdean,” she said by e-mail from her home in São Vicente, Cape Verde. “That must be why he fought for the unification of his two home countries.”

She also pointed out that it’s important for the youth in Guinea-Bissau to study the history of the national liberation movement.

“Every country needs heroes and examples of mythical characters, and Cabral is all that,” she wrote. “I’m very happy with Unesco for rehabilitating his house.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by Cabral’s 62-year-old niece, Iva Helena Gomes. She lives in Bissau, as do Cabral’s twin sisters, who are in their 70s. Gomes said it was nice to finally see her uncle recognized.

“For many years you were not even allowed to say the name ‘Cabral,’ “she said, referring to the years of animosity after João Bernardo Vieira, a dictator, ousted Amílcar’s half-brother, Luís, from the presidency of Guinea-Bissau in a military coup in 1980. (Luís was named president of the country after Amílcar’s death.)

Cabral’s spirit hovers over Bissau, where a 17-foot-tall bronze statue of him sits in the center of a roundabout near the airport, donated by the Cubans in 1985 and finally put up in 2009. Bissau’s only private university is also named after him.

The recreated Catholic altar in the Cabral house and a bedroom behind the curtain. MIRVA LEMPIAINEN

In Bafatá, two new monuments commemorate Cabral, and tens of black and white photos of him line the walls of the future museum. The six small rooms of the house have been redone to resemble how they might have looked nearly 100 years ago, with iron frame beds and a small Catholic home altar.

Lopes said the finished museum will have a computer, so visitors can listen to Cabral’s interviews and seminars. A Web site is also planned to promote the museum toward an international audience.

“Cabral contributed a lot for the African continent,” Lopes said.

Besides the photos, other artifacts are being collected from the various countries where Cabral spent time. These include pictures and videos from Cuba, China, Portugal and Russia, reflecting the countries that supported his freedom movement. When the museum opens, a guide will be available to explain the stories behind the memorabilia.

Adriano Gomes Ferreira, the governor of Bafatá, is excited about the new developments in the town, which has a population of 20,000. He agreed that it was important to educate Guineans about Cabral — especially now.

“It’s our obligation,” he said. “Without the past, there’s no future.”

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A Yellow Bird Apache dancer performing at the Human Rights Council. A report on the rights of indigenous people in the US says they are still hurting from the past. JEAN-MARC FERRE/UN PHOTO

The relationship between the United States government and the United Nations machinery of human rights reporting has been a troubled one. Over the years, numerous UN rights monitors – called rapporteurs — have often been unwelcome visitors, sometimes refused permission to visit institutions like prisons or courts in some American states.

The reception got a little warmer beginning in the 1990s, and now a full report is being prepared for the Human Rights Council on the rights of indigenous people on the US mainland and in Alaska and Hawaii. The monitor, who has just completed a 12-day tour of indigenous homelands, is an American: James Anaya, a professor of human rights law and policy at the University of Arizona.

His report coincides with an indigenous people’s forum going on at the UN in New York, where nearly 2,000 participants from across the world are taking part in a two-week session on the status of their rights and other markers of well-being. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is convening a high-level event on May 17 to cap off the forum, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Anaya, the rapporteur, was born in California into a family rooted in what is now New Mexico, long before it became part of the US in 1853. The fact that he is an American cuts two ways. On the one hand, it saves him from being branded by the most intemperate critics as a foreigner who has no business making judgments about American handling of human rights issues, though he could not arrange a meeting in Congress this year, so apparently there are still problems.

On the other hand, Anaya, a lawyer with a Harvard degree, is a well-known advocate and litigator for indigenous people across the hemisphere and may not be considered an impartial observer – as he would be, for example, in work he has done in places as far afield as Thailand. He has been the UN rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people since 2008.  His final report to the Human Rights Council, probably at a session in September, will be scrutinized.

The US endorsed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in December 2010, and President Obama himself acknowledged shortcomings in upholding the rights and serving Indian communities in a report to the Human Rights Council in 2010.

In a preliminary paper released on May 4, Anaya, who visited both rural and urban indigenous communities in Alaska, Arizona, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Washington State, said that he “heard stories that make evident the profound hurt that indigenous peoples continue to feel because of the history of oppression they have faced.” He concluded that this past lies behind the “present-day disadvantage for indigenous people in the country.”

“This history— as is widely known but often forgotten — includes the dispossession of the vast majority of their lands and resources, the removal of children from their families and communities, the breakdown of their traditional structures, the loss of their languages, the breaking of treaties, and numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination,” Anaya wrote.

James Anaya, an American who monitors the rights of indigenous people for the UN. JEAN-MARC FERRE

In his paper, Anaya previewed his recommendations to come: “Continued and concerted measures are needed to develop new initiatives and reform existing ones, in consultation and in real partnership with indigenous peoples, to conform to the Declaration [of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] with a goal towards strengthening indigenous peoples’ own self-determination and decision-making over their affairs at all levels.”

Anaya, who thanks the State Department and federal officials in Washington, D.C., for their help in arranging his mission and sharing information, concludes: “It is evident that there have still not been adequate measures of reconciliation to overcome the persistent legacies of the history of oppression, and that there is still much healing that needs to be done.” He does not address in detail existing federal social and educational policies and programs already serving indigenous people or the phenomenon of casino gambling that has brought considerable wealth to some communities.

In his final report, Anaya will have to balance the demands he heard for greater indigenous sovereignty over lands and institutions against the equally insistent calls for more American government programs in the same communities. It will be an interesting outcome.

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