GRASS ROOTS PEACEMAKERS

Throughout 2001, Nigeria had ethnic and tribal violence, leaving about 50,000 persons displaced from their home villages. Recently there were about twenty-two million refugees, including twelve million recognized refugees, 800,000 returnees, and eight million miscellaneous refugees. In the Congo 1.8 million are displaced. Afghanistan has a staggering refugee problem. Columbia’s refugees increased to about 125,000. Tens of thousands of refugees fled Sierra Leone and Liberia. Many countries reduced their contributions to refugees, leaving a shortfall of $100 million, forcing Rud Lubbers, the High Commissioner for Refugees, to reduce his staff by 800. The resettlement of refugees in other countries has been tried, with little success.

The responsibilities of the UN cover a very wide range of human activity. The organization’s comprehensive agenda has been developed by many different agencies and programs. It is a channel for world funds to be allocated to meet the UN mandate, an organization for service, research statistics and information dissemination, and a place for communication and advocacy respecting international problems and solutions. (See Appendix I for a list of the main 2002 priority activities of the UN.)

In addition to securing world peace and human rights, the UN has the objective to improve daily life in developing countries with environmental, social, and economic programs. Problems of famine, shelter, population control, drug abuse, health care, and maintaining a sustainable, healthy, and economic environment are addressed by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The UN does this with help from hundreds of governmental agencies as well as the volunteer NGOs of civil society.

The Globe and Mail, Canada, reported on March 25, 2002—“‘Of the 600 million children in the world, 150 million suffer from malnutrition,’ say UN officials. ‘Almost 11 million die each year of preventable disease.’” Annual income in the forty-one poorest countries is well below $300, compared to about $15,000 for developed countries. Seventy percent of the world’s income is produced and consumed by fifteen percent of the population. Living standards in Latin America are lower today than in the 1970s, and African living standards have slipped to the level of the 1960s. Over 900 million adults worldwide are illiterate. A UN executive has written—“The gap in living standards between the world’s rich and poor has steadily grown . . . Industrial societies . . . have prospered, but a billion people [still] live in absolute poverty”.

UN Environment Programs operate in many areas, assisting in monitoring the results of environment management by local government, industry, agriculture, and management of water, and scarce resources. An environmental adviser notes, “Poor people can be stopped at borders, but poverty can’t be stopped. Poverty travels in the form of drugs, terrorism, ignorance, and AIDS.”

The UN has been a major supporter of global environmental conferences. At the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a large majority of world governments signed a pact to reduce global warming. In 1997, at a follow-up world conference in Japan of 116 nations on global warming, eighty-four signed the Kyoto Protocol. By 2002, fifty-four nations have ratified or exceeded the commitment of industrialized countries to reduce the emission of six polluting gases by an average of 5.2 percent (below 1990 levels) by 2012. Some large industrialized countries have still not ratified the Kyoto Protocol. This problem was the main item on the agenda of the 2002 Earth Summit at Johannesburg, South Africa.

The interrelationship between peace, environment, health, living standards, and development was stressed by Ms. Gro Harlem Bruntland, Director-General of the World Health Organization, a medical doctor and three times Prime Minister of Norway, in an article in the Britannica 1998 edition:1 “Concerns about environment, health, population, women, and development . . . [these] are global in nature . . . [and] can be overcome only by intensified global cooperation and by strong, efficient, and forward-looking international institutions underpinning our common efforts . . . In 2000, almost three billion of the world’s six billion lived in urban areas. A failure to manage the urban infrastructure will lead to further mushrooming of settlements having insufficient access to essential facilities such as clean water, sanitation, food supplies, transportation, education, health care, and other public services. We know what that means: overcrowding and a disease pattern linked to poverty and an unhealthy environment.”