The United Nations (UN) together with the governments of Sweden and Switzerland which have often led humanitarian issues in the UN system held a high-level pledging conference in Geneva on April 25, 2017 to again draw attention to the deepening humanitarian crisis in war-torn Yemen, currently the largest food security emergency in the world. Some 60% of the population are in a food-insecure situation.
More than 3.5 million people have been displaced in the cycle of escalating violence. “We are witnessing the starving and the crippling of an entire generation. We must act now, to save lives” said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who presided over the conference. Realistically, he stressed that funding and humanitarian aid alone will not reverse the fortunes of the millions of people impacted. Diplomatically, he called for a cessation of hostilities and a political settlement with talks facilitated by the Special Envoy of the Secretary General, the Mauritanian diplomat Ismail Ould Chekh Ahmed.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
UN officials and most diplomats are reluctant to call the armed conflict by its real name: “a war of aggression”. The aggression of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition (Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates) against Yemen began on March 24, 2015.
The Saudi-led coalition is helped with arms and “intelligence” by the USA and the UK which appreciate Saudi money for arms and do not want to antagonize a large segment of the Arab world when the conflicts of Syria-Iraq-Kurds-Turkey is still “on the table.”
However, the aggression of the Saudi coalition is what has turned an internal Yemen struggle for power between the current and the former President of Yemen into a war with regional implications, now drawing Iran into the picture.
Intellectually, the “political solution” is clear. There needs to be an end to the Saudi bombing and a withdrawal of its coalition troops. Then, the different factions in Yemen can try to develop some sort of inclusive government. The Swiss Foreign Minister, a co-host of the conference, hinted to the issue in suggesting very briefly that, if asked, Switzerland could provide expertise on forms of decentralization and con-federal government.
A destroyed house in the south of Sana’a, Yemen.
The effort to create a centralized Yemen government has failed. The future lies in a very decentralized government with great autonomy for the regions, taking into consideration the diverse tribal configuration of the country. With intelligence and patience – always in short supply – a single, highly decentralized State might be developed.
The most difficult first-step is ending Saudi-led aggression, after which an effective humanitarian aid and development program can be put into effect.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
[themify_quote]“He who would understand the Plains must ascend the Eternal Hills, where a man’s eyes scan Infinity. Be he who would make use of understanding must descend on the Plains where Past and Future meet, and men have need of him.” — Talbut Mundy, Om-The Secret of Abbor Valley[/themify_quote]
Talbut Mundy
Talbot Mundy was born in England as William Lancaster Gibbon but used the name Talbot Mundy when he started to be published in 1911. Probably, he also wanted to put his English past behind him as he became highly critical of British colonial policy, though he remained influenced by the example and the writing style of Edward Bulwer-Lytton who tried to use the popular novel such as Zanoni(1842) as a way of shaping mass public opinion. In Zanoni, Zanoni is an immortal sage and member of a secret brotherhood dedicated to helping humanity and holding esoteric knowledge. Bulwer-Lytton was an early advocate of feminism with the idea that women are more spiritually advanced than men, a theme that Talbot Mundy develops in his books.
Talbot Mundy left home when he was 16 to go to India, then Africa, the Middle East, and finally settled in the USA. He took a different wife in each geographic area, perhaps as a way to understand the culture better. The women characters in his novels are all a doorway to deeper understanding of spiritual insights and as keepers of the best of the specific culture. He went to India first in 1899 as a relief worker in Baroda and then in 1901 to report for newspapers on the fighting on the north west frontier, which served as background for King of the Khyber Rifles.(1916) He met his first wife, an Englishwoman living in India and married in 1903. He developed a dislike for English colonial life in India with its contempt for Indian culture. He absorbed the Indian myths of spiritual masters and secret societies that were positive agents of world events — themes that he developed especially in his The Nine Unknown (1924) — a secret society founded by the Emperor Asoka around 270 BCE and which continued to the present, helping social and political reforms but secluded from open view. It is a theme developed later in Black Light and for short stories which he wrote in the USA for Adventure, a magazine of popular fiction.
Influenced by the example of Richard Burton (1821-1890) who combined experiences in India and Africa along with an interest in sexual practices — Burton having translated and introduced to Western readers the Kama Sutra, Talbot Mundy left India for Africa, where he met the woman who became his second wife. Africa played a lesser role in his novels but served as background for many of his short stories. After his short stay in Africa, he moved to the USA, where he divorced again and married his third wife, who was a member of a religious movement with its roots in New England, Christian Science.
From his Christian Science wife, he absorbed the idea of the power of positive thinking which fitted in with the thought power of Indian yogis. Talbot Mundy became President of the Christian-Science-related Anglo-American Society Relief Effort for Palestine, a society that was focused on aid for the Armenians who had fled what had become Turkey and were now living in the Middle East, especially Lebanon and Palestine. In 1921, Mundy left the US to work in the Middle East, both to help administer the relief efforts and to write for the Jerusalem News.
By 1922, he had again divorced and married his fourth wife, Sally, who had also been doing relief work in the Middle East. Mundy, who was already critical of British colonial policy in India, quickly came to dislike British policy in the Middle East. He wrote a series of novels and short stories with Jim Grim, an English intelligence agent, as hero and as an avenue for Mundy’s cynical views on English policy-making.
By 1924, he had moved back to the USA where he lived in San Diego, California at the Point Loma Theosophical Movement headquarters. There he wrote his best theosophical novel, Om, the Secret of Abbor Valley. The novel was written by Talbot Mundy to express the working of karma that ancient law of individual responsibility which gives humans their dignity.
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“We act and react, do and leave undone, think and refuse to think, stand firm or are seduced while karma – incorruptible and inescapable – inscribes our spiritual progress on the rolls of destiny The Law adjusts all balances and measures, the exact effort of every thought and deed, directing each hidden motive.”
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For five years he was the editor of The Theosophical Path, and worked closely with Katherine Tingley (1847-1929), the head of the Point Loma movement. In 1929, he left Point Loma for New York City, where he took rooms at the Masters Building on Riverside Drive which had been created by Nicholas Roerich as a center for interaction among all the arts — music, painting, dance — . Mundy used some of Nicholas Roerich’s experiences in Asia, especially Tibet, and Roerich’s interest in Shambhala, a hidden city from which spiritual masters would send messengers to influence positively world events. Much of the Shambhala myth is used in Mundy’s King of the World. In New York, Mundy was active in theosophical and astrological circles, though none of his New York writings matched the power of Om,which merits being discovered by those who have not read it. For his bread and butter, Mundy wrote the radio scripts for the popular youth radio program “Jack Armstrong: the All-American Boy”. Jack Armstrong was the adventure side of Talbot Mundy without the spiritual dimension or the political critique.
NOTE:
(1) For a fuller account of his life see Peter B. Ellis The Last Adventurer: The Life of Talbot Mundy(1984).
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
UNESCO is stressing global citizenship education to meet the challenges of the 21st century by developing a sense of belonging to a common humanity, sharing values and responsibilities. Global citizenship education aims to give a profound understanding that humanity will respond creatively to the challenges of our times. Global citizenship education promotes attitudes of care and empathy for others and for Nature. One of the early founders os such education was Maria Motessori.
Maria Montessori (1870-1952) an Italian childhood educator and world citizen would have been pleased at the efforts of the United Nations and UNESCO to promote Global Citizenship Education. (1) Montessori argued for a child’s dignity and autonomy and for the ability of the child to break out of the narrow bonds of nationalistic education. She stressed that children have a unique consciousness and a special sensitivity in the early years which must be nurtured and allowed to develop along its own course.
Maria Montessori
The world citizen spirit of Maria Montessori’s teaching displeased the narrow nationalist leaders in power in the 1930s. The Fascist government of Mussolini closed the Montessori schools in Italy in 1934 as did Hitler in Germany and then in Austria when Hitler’s troops moved into Vienna. The dictators saw that creative thinking among children was a danger to their authoritarian rule. She spent the Second World War years in India at the Theosophical Society headquarters at Adyar where her educational ideas influenced a growing number of Indian teachers.
She stressed education for world citizenship in both content and methodology for as she pointed out access to education and to various forms of learning is a necessary but not sufficient condition to world citizenship education. A comprehensive system of education and training is needed for all groups of people and at all levels, both formal and non-formal. The development of a holistic approach based on participatory methods is crucial.
Education for world citizenship today builds upon the values and activities of the UN-designated International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010). The UN General Assembly proclaimed the International Decade stating that the Decade “would greatly assist the efforts of the international community to foster peace, harmony, all human rights, and democracy throughout the world.” The Decade was to lead to “the promotion of democracy, tolerance, dialogue, reconciliation and solidarity as well as to international cooperation and economic development, and thus to sustainable human development.”
Education for world citizenship is necessary to embrace all facets of human experience. Such education must prepare us to help meet the challenges which face us, challenges so vast, so complex and so constantly changing their nature and scope. Education for world citizenship must prepare us collectively to know the yet unknown. Our physical, social, and spiritual development expands naturally from the personal towards the global. This learning process leads through both chartered and unchartered territory in an ongoing exploration of life.
The visionary and yet very practical educational spirit of Maria Montessori remains an inspiration as we develop world-wide educational forms to prepare us for the emerging world society.
Notes
1. UNESCO has produced a very useful guide “Global Citizenship Education: Topics and Learning Objectives” with a good bibliography and websites of organizations dealing with education for global citizenship. See their website for further information.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
Our modern Western nationalism has an ecclesiastical tinge, for, while in one aspect it is a reversion to the idolatrous self-worship of the tribe which was the only religion known to Man before the first of the ‘higher religions’ were discovered by an oppressed internal proletariat…it is a tribalism with a difference. The primitive religion has been deformed into an enormity through being power-driven with a mis-applied Christian driving-force. Arnold Toynbee A Study of History
Arnold Toynbee
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) whose birth anniversary we mark on 14 April, was a historian, a philosopher of history and an advisor on the wider Middle East to the British Government. Already a specialist on Greece and the Middle East from his university studies and in the intelligence services during the First World War, he was an expert delegate on the English delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new states in the Middle East followed. Also there was the start of Zionist activities in Palestine and frontier and population transfers between Greece and Turkey – all issues on which Toynbee gave advice. He became director of studies of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) an early “think tank” created to advise the British Government.
At the same time that he was an advisor on the Middle East (Chatham House producing a respected Yearbook on world affairs) Toynbee continued writing on the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, much influenced by the spirit of Thucydides. Toynbee was struck by the alternative between union and division as the defining characteristic of classical Greece. These were the centuries of the flowering and then final decadence of a civilization which bears remarkable parallels with the history and perspectives of modern Europe. Toynbee argued that Greece’s economic development, based on colonization and commerce, together with the maintenance of the political sovereignty of the very small territorial units of the city-state, created an imbalance that could not last. The city-states, if they did not want to return to autocracy and economic backwardness, should have created a pan-Hellenic political organization to manage problems. In the same way that Greece failed to mitigate the anarchic character of relations between city-states, so Western civilization may flounder and fail.
As Toynbee wrote in Mankind and Mother Earth“Evidently few people are ready to recognize that the institution of local sovereign states has failed repeatedly, during the last 5,000 years, to meet mankind’s political needs, and that, in a global society, this nstitution is bound to prove to be transitory once again and this time more surely than ever before.”
Toynbee placed his hope in creative leaders, who, seeing the challenges of the times, would respond with the creation of new, more just and peaceful institutions. The number of creative leaders has been in short supply, but the challenges still face us.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
The defense of those using their conscience to uphold humanitarian international law.
The Association of World Citizens calls for the re-affirmation of humanitarian international law. It is a call to the soldiers and militia members in armed conflicts to refuse orders to violate humanitarian international law by refusing to use weapons outlawed by international treaties such as chemical weapons, land mines, cluster munitions or any weapon to attack civilians, especially children and women. We must defend all who use their individual conscience to refuse to follow orders to violate humanitarian international law.
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At the heart of this growing phenomenon of mass violence and social disintegration is a crisis of values. Perhaps the most fundamental loss a society can suffer is the collapse of its own value system. Many societies exposed to protracted conflicts have seen their community values radically undermined if not shattered altogether. This has given rise to an ethical vacuum, a setting in which international standards are ignored with impunity and where local value systems have lost their sway. Olara Otunnu, then Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Report to U.N. General Assembly, 1998
The attack on Khan Sheikhoon in Idib Province of Syria on 4 April 2017 raises at least two essential issues concerning humanitarian international law and the protection of children in times of armed conflict.
A major issue is the use of chemical weapons, probably sarin or a sarin-like substance in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare of which Syria was a party, among the 135 governments which have signed. The attack was also a violation of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction which came into force in 1997. The Convention created The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Syria signed the Convention in 2013 as part of a compromise decision to have its chemical-weapon stock destroyed.
The use of poison gas strikes deep, partly subconscious, reactions not provoked in the same way as seeing someone shot by a machine gun. The classic Greeks and Romans had a prohibition against the use of poison in war, especially poisoning water well because everyone needs to drink. Likewise poison gas is abhorred because everyone needs to breath to live.
There is a real danger that the Geneva Protocol of 1925, one of the oldest norms of humanitarian international law will be undermined and the use of chemical weapons “normalized”. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is already investigating the use of chemical weapons in seven other locations in Syria.
Chemical weapons have been used in armed conflicts in the Middle East before. Although Egypt had signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol, Egyptian forces used chemical weapons widely in their support of the republican forces in the Yemen Civil War (1962-1967) with very few international outcries. As a result of the lack of any sanctions against Egypt, Syria requested Egyptian technical assistance in developing its own chemical weapons capabilities shortly after 1967 – well before the al-Assad dynasty came to power.
Humanitarian international law is largely based on self-imposed restraints. Although the International Criminal Court has a mandate to try crimes of war and crimes against humanity, its impact on the way armed conflicts are currently carried out is small. Thus, restraints need to rest on the refusal of soldiers and militia members to carry out actions that they know to be against both humanitarian international law and the local value system. This is especially true of the non-harming of children in times of armed conflict.
Humanitarian international law creates an obligation to maintain the protection of all non-combatants caught in the midst of violent conflicts as set out in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977. Moreover, there is an urgent need to focus special attention on the plight of children. They are the least responsible for the conflict and yet are most vulnerable. They need special protection. The norms to protect children in armed conflicts are set out clearly in the Additional Protocols which has 25 articles specifically pertaining to children. The norms are also clearly stated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most universally ratified international treaty. The Convention calls for the protection of the child’s right to life, education, health and other fundamental needs. These provisions apply equally in times of armed conflict and in times of peace.
As with the use of weapons prohibited by international treaty: chemical weapons, land mines, cluster munitions, the protection of children must be embodied in local values and practice. The classic Chinese philosopher Mencius, in maintaining that human were basically good, used the example of a child about to fall into a well who would be saved by anyone regardless of status or education.
The Association of World Citizens has called for a United Nations-led conference on the re-affirmation of humanitarian, international law. There needs to be a world-wide effort on the part of governments and non-governmental organizations to re-affirm humanitarian values and the international treaties which make them governmental obligations. Such a conference would bring together into a coherent synthesis the four avenues of humanitarian international law:
1) The Geneva Conventions – Red Cross-mandated treaties;
2) The Hague Convention tradition dealing with prohibited weapons, highlighting recent treaties such as those on land mines and cluster munitions;
3) Human rights conventions and standards, valid at all times but especially violated in times of armed conflicts;
4) The protection of sites and monuments which have been designated by UNESCO as part of the cultural heritage of humanity, highlighting the August 2016 decision of the International Criminal Court on the destruction of Sufi shrines in northern Mali.
There is also a need to use whatever avenues of communication we have to stress to those living in Syria-Iraq-ISIS-Kurd-majority areas-and Turkey that they have a moral duty to disobey orders that violate humanitarian international law. We on the outside must do all we can to protect those who so act humanly in accord with their conscience.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
“Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures— the building up of a civilization —so that the human might reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will, it is most united with all other life”
George Russell: The Song of the Greater Life
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George Russell (1867-1935) whose birth anniversary we mark on 10 April was an Irish poet, painter, mystic, and reformer of agriculture in the years 1900 to the mid-1930s. He wrote under the initials A.E. and was so well known as A.E. that his friends called him “A.E.” and not “George”. He was a close friend and co-worker with William Butler Yeats who was a better poet and whose poems are more read today. Both A.E. and Yeats were part of the Irish or Celtic revival which worked for a cultural renewal as part of the effort to get political independence from England.
George Russell 1867-1935
Ireland lived under a subtle form of colonialism rather than the more obvious Empire in Africa or India where domination was made more obvious by the distance from the center of power and the racial differences. The Irish were white, Christian, and partially anglicized culturally. English and Scots had moved to Ireland and by the end of the 19th century became the landed gentry. Thus Russell and Yeats felt that there had to be a renewal of Irish culture upon which a state could be built. Yet for A.E. political independence was only a first step to building a country of character and intellect “a civilization worthy of our hopes and our ages of struggle and sacrifice”. He lamented that “For all our passionate discussions over self-government we have had little speculation over our own character or the nature of the civilization we wished to create for ourselves…The nation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its laws, but as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark and issuing orders.”
For A.E. the truly modern are those engaged in meditation and spiritual disciplines, a way of reaching “the world of the spirit where all hearts and minds are one.” Unless the Celtic peoples create a new civilization, they will disappear and be replaced by a more vigorous race. An Irish identity must be open and unafraid of assimilating the best that other traditions have to offer. As A.E.wrote“To see, we must be exalted. When our lamp is lit, we find the house our being has many chambers…and windows which open into eternity.” As he said of Ireland, “a land where lived a perfectly impossible people with whom anything was possible.”
When the Irish Free State was created in 1919, the island was partitioned, Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. Tensions between the Free State government and the Republicans who rejected the partition led to a civil war. Even after the civil war’s end in 1923, Republican resistance and general lawlessness continued throughout the 1920s. During its first decade the Free State government faced a serious crisis of legitimacy. It had to assert the new state’s political and cultural integrity in the face of partition and the lack of social change. In its economic structures, legal system, post-colonial Ireland looked much like colonial Ireland. Therefore the government stressed an “Irish culture” of the most repressive and narrow form. The Roman Catholic Church had a unique and virtually unquestioned monopoly on education in Ireland. Popular Irish nationalism had been structured around the antithesis between Ireland and England, and this continued after independence when it was said that all “immorality” — obscene literature, wild dances and immodest fashions — came from England. After 1923, the Catholic hierarchy fulminated most consistently and strongly against sexual immorality, not merely as wrong, but, increasingly from the 1920s on, as a threat to the Irish nation.
To counter this narrow, state organized vision of culture, A.E. put all his energies into a revival of rural Ireland through organizing the Farmers’ Co-operative Movement. He stressed that “the decay of civilization comes from the neglect of agriculture. There is a need to create, consciously, a rural civilization. You simply cannot aid the farmers in an economic way and neglect the cultural and educational part of country life…On the labours of the countryman depend the whole strength and health, nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. Yet the European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in nature — the task so often disturbed, the labour so often destroyed.”
Both A.E. and Yeats came from Protestant backgrounds and were deeply influenced by Indian thought reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads where sexual passion is the link between body, soul, and spirit. In his only novelThe Avatars, A.E. wrote “such was the playof Helen which made men realise that beauty was a divinity. Such was the play of Radha and Krishna which taught lovers how to evoke god and goddess in each other.” The Avatar in Hindu thought is a spiritual being which takes human form in order to reveal the spiritual character of a race to itself such as Rama, Krishna or Jesus. In Indian thought the Avatar was always a man and came alone. But in A.E.’s story the Avatars are a man and a woman who teach the unity of all life as seen by the love between the two. There is but one life, divided endlessly, differing in degree but not in kind. “The majesty which held constellations and galaxies, sun, stars and moons inflexibly in their paths, could yet throw itself into infinite, minute and delicate forms of loveliness with no less joy, and he knew that the tiny grass might whisper its love to an omnipotence that was tender towards it. What he had felt was but an infinitesimal part of that glory. There was no end to it.”
A.E. knew that he was going against the current of the moment. As he wrote “There never yet was a fire which did not cast dark shadows of itself.” At the end of the novel, the Avatars are put to death, but their teaching goes on “It is this sense of the universe as spiritual being which has become common between us, that a vast tenderness enfloods us, is about us and within us.” Yet below the surface of narrow tensions in Ireland A.E. saw that “We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the lofty edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious.”
He lived the last years of his life in London, outside of Irish politics. He had a close friendship with Henry Wallace who became the first Secretary of the USA New Deal in 1933 and saw in the efforts to help the depression-hit farmers under Wallace his hope for rural renewal.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
[pullquote][themify_box color=”green”] Only the bridge of Beauty will be strong enough for crossing from the bank of Darkness to the side of Light– Nicholas Roerich [/themify_box][/pullquote]
Nicholas Roerich, the Russian painter, explorer, and cultural activist, stressed throughout his life the role of beauty and culture in bringing humanity together in unity. “True art is the expression of the radiant spirit.” Art is the manifestation of the coming synthesis of the spiritual and the material. The gates of the sacred source must be opened wide for everybody, and the light of art will ignite numerous hearts with a new love. At first this feeling will be unconscious, but after all it will purify human consciousness. Bring art to the people “where it belongs. We should have not only museums, theatres, universities, public libraries, railway stations and hospitals, but even prisons decorated and beautified.”
His inspiration is still at work today in many efforts to preserve the art of the past and to create an art of the future which speaks to the highest aspiration of the person.
Roerich gained recognition at a young age in St. Petersburg art circles. His paintings of early Russian life, inspired in part by his archaeological excavations of tumuli “a reminder of the Vikings in Russia” were popular among those who were looking for inspiration in the Russian past.
There were some among the Slavophiles of the early 1900s who felt that Russia had a unique culture and thus a special role to play in the salvation of humanity. They rejected anything coming from Western Europe. However, Roerich, while close to some of the Slavophiles, especially Princess Maria Tenisheva and her efforts at the experimental village Talashkino, was never hostile to artistic creation from non-Russian cultures. As he said “The chief significance of an artistic education lies in opening up wide horizons to the pupils and in inculcating the conception of art as something infinite.” Roerich believed that one had to preserve and develop what was best in local culture as a contribution to a world culture in which the best of local cultures would be preserved. “Culture is a constant becoming, a dynamic evolution of a living world.”
Probably the most influential aspect of Roerich’s Russian period was his cooperation with Igor Stravinsky for the theme and the music of the Sacre du Printemps and with Sergei Diaghilev for the ballet, costumes and scenery of the Sacre in Paris in 1913, a music and dance which revolutionized ballet at the time. As Roerich wrote of Le Sacre “The eternal novelty of the Sacre is because spring is eternal, and love is eternal and sacrifice is eternal. Then in this new conception, Stravinsky touches the eternal in music. He was modern because he evoked the future; it is the great serpent ring touching the great past —the sacred tunes that connect the great past and the future.”
The Sacre is the most Dionysian of Roerich’s inspiration. His painting of 1911 “The Forefathers” at the time of Roerich’s collaboration with Stravinsky might almost be a sketch for the opening of the Sacre, whose early pages quiver with the sound of pipes. Here Dionysus-like, primitive man charms with his piping a circle of wild beasts, in this case, bears, reflecting the Slavic tradition that bears were man’s forefathers.
Stravinsky was presented to Roerich by Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian with a holistic vision of art: music, painting, dance, and the publisher of The World of Art magazine. Roerich had already designed some of the sets for Borodin’s Prince Igor produced by Diaghilev in Paris in 1909. Roerich produced the outline and the theme for Le Sacre and later designed the sets and the costumes.
In 1901, Nicholas Roerich had married Elena Ivanovona who shared his interest in art, music and the philosophy of China, Tibet and India. Later, in the West she wrote her name as Helena and also published under the pen name Josephine Saint-Hilaire On Easterm Crossroads (1930). The Russian composer Moussorgsky was her uncle. The young couple cooperated with the Buriat Lama Dorzhiev in building a Tibetan Buddist Temple in St. Petersburg.
Dorzhiev saw the possibility of an alliance of the Buriats, Kaimyk and other Buddhist tribes living in the eastern part of Russia with the thirteenth Dalai Lama, who was the most politically aware of the Dalai Lamas. The alliance was to be headed by the Tsar Nicholas II and would have been a counter weight to English and Chinese influence in Tibet.
From Dorzhiev, the Roerichs learned of the Tibetan text and ritual, the Kalachakra
(The Wheel of Time) and of the coming of a new historical-astrological cycle “The New Age” to be marked by a new Buddha, Maitreya. (1) Nicholas II, however, was not to become “the Bodhisatva Tsar”. He was soon caught up by the 1917 Russian Revolution. By 1918, the Roerichs left Russia foreseeing the Soviet policy of controlling all art forms for narrow political purposes.
After a short stay in Western Europe, the Roerichs moved to the United States where his paintings had already been shown. With American friends, he created the Master School of the United Arts in 1922 in New York City, where music, art and philosophy were taught. Students were advised to “Look forward, forget the past, think of the service of the future.Exalt others in spirit and look ahead.”
In 1924, the Roerichs left for India and travelled especially in the Himalayan areas. For Roerich, mountains represented a path to the spiritual life. “Mountains, what magnetic forces are concealed within you. What a symbol of quietude is revealed in every sparking peak. The highest knowledge, the most inspired songs, the most superb sounds and colors, are created on the mountains. On the highest mountains there is the Supreme.”
The Roerichs undertook a number of expeditions to Central Asia and the Altai Mountains of Russia (1923-1928 and 1933-1935) along with their son George, who became a specialist of Tibetan culture and language. George Roerich’s Trails to Inmost Asia (Yale University Press, 1931) is a good and unsentimental account of these trips, George being assigned the hard work of running the logistics.
Nicholas Roerich always remained convinced of the need to preserve local culture. He put an emphasis on collecting folk tales and traditional practices of medicine, especially the use of herbs. “In every encampment of Asia, I tried to unveil what memories were cherished in the folk memory. Through these guarded and preserved tales, you may recognize the reality of the past. In every spark of folklore, there is a drop of the great Truth adorned or distorted.”
Roerich’s desire to make known the artistic achievements of the past through archaeology, coupled with the need to preserve the landmarks of the past from destruction, led to his work for the Banner of Peace to preserve art and architecture in time of war. Roerich had seen the destruction brought by the First World War and the civil war which followed the 1917 Russian Revolution. He worked with French international lawyers to draft a treaty by which museums, churches and buildings of value would be preserved in time of war through the use of a symbol — three red circles representing past, present and future— a practice inspired by the red cross used to protect medical personnel in times of conflict.
Roerich mobilized artists and intellectuals in the 1920s for the establishment of this Banner of Peace. Henry A. Wallace, the US Secretary of Agriculture and later Vice-President, was an admirer of Roerich and helped to have an official treaty introducing the Banner of Peace — the Roerich Peace Pact — signed at the White House on 15 April 1935 by 21 States in a Pan-American Union ceremony.
At the signing, Henry Wallace on behalf of the USA said “At no time has such an ideal been more needed. It is high time for the idealists who make the reality of tomorrow, to rally around such a symbol of international cultural unity. It is time that we appeal to that appreciation of beauty, science, education which runs across all national boundaries to strengthen all that we hold dear in our particular governments and customs. Its acceptance signifies the approach of a time when those who truly love their own nation will appreciate in addition the unique contribution of other nations and also do reverence to that common spiritual enterprise which draws together in one fellowship all artists, scientists, educators and truly religious of whatever faith.”
As Nicholas Roerich said in a presentation of his Pact “The world is striving toward peace in many ways, and everyone realizes in his heart that this constructive work is a true prophesy of the New Era. We deplore the loss of the libraries of Louvain and Oviedo and the irreplaceable beauty of the Cathedral of Rheins. We remember the beautiful treasures of private collections which were lost during world calamities. But we do not want to inscribe on these deeds any words of hatred. Let us simply say: Destroyed by human ignorance —rebuilt by human hope.”
After the Second World War, UNESCO has continued the effort, and there have been additional conventions on the protection of cultural and educational bodies in times of conflict, in particular The Hague Convention of May 1954 though no universal symbol as proposed by Nicholas Roerich has been developed.
Today, the need to bring beauty to as many people as possible is the prime task of developing a culture of peace. As Nicholas Roerich wrote “The most gratifying and uplifting way to serve the coming evolution is by spreading the seeds of beauty. If we are to have a beautiful life and some happiness it must be created with joy and enthusiasm for service to art and beauty.”
See Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre Maitreya: The Future Buddha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 304pp.)
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
On 5 April 2017, the European Union and the United Nations will hold a joint conference on the future of Syria and its region. “Civil Society” is invited to participate, but it is not clear in advance if the Brussels meeting will be a “fund raising” one, in which case most non-governmental organizations (NGO) in consultative status with the UN will have little to contribute or if there will be wider aims.
The EU-UN meeting is the third in a short space of time concerning Syria, a reflection of concern with the refugee flow and the continued violence and suffering in Syria and Iraq. The following is a text written on behalf of the Association of World Citizens (AWC) [http://www.worldcitizensunited.org, https://awcungeneva.com] that is being sent to governments in advance of the 5 April conference. The text notes earlier appeals and efforts of the AWC in the Syria-Iraq-Turkey conflicts.
Following the 23-25 January 2017 talks in Astana, Kazakhstan sponsored by the Russian Federation, Turkey, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a new round of UN-sponsored talks, 23-31 March was held in Geneva (informally called Geneva 4). The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Mr Staffan de Mistura has led the UN, Geneva and Lausanne-based talks. Not all the parties involved in the Syria-Iraq conflicts are participants in the talks. ISIS and the Kurds were not present nor all segments of the opposition to the Government of President Bashar al-Assad have been formally present. What informal talks are held in Geneva hotels and restaurants during the negotiations are not officially reported. There is a large and active Kurdish community in the Geneva area and some may be spokespersons for the effort to create Rojava, a Kurdish autonomous zone in Northern Syria that might form some sort of association with the Kurdish autonomous area of Iraq.
The Geneva-based talks have concerned short-term issues such as a ceasefire, safety of Syrian civilians and humanitarian access. There have also been longer-range issues concerning political processes such as a transition administration, constitutional changes, and elections for a new, more broadly based government.
Parallel to the intra-Syrian talks mediated by Mr de Mistura, the United Nations has been concerned with the human rights issues having created an Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic as well as a joint UN-Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons investigative mechanism.
The Association of World Citizens,(AWC), a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the UN, active on issues of the resolution of armed conflicts and the promotion of human rights, had welcome a 20 July 2011 call of then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for an inclusive dialogue to respond to pressing grievances and longer-term concerns of the Syrian people. The AWC, in a message to the Secretary-General encouraged broad participation of Syrian civil society in such a dialogue and indicated that AWC,knowing the possible usefulness of international NGOs in conflict resolution, would help facilitate such discussions in any way considered appropriate.
In December 2011, there was the start of a short-lived Observer Mission of the League of Arab States. In a 9 February 2012 message to the Secretary General of the League of Arab States, Ambassador Nabil el-Araby, the Association of World Citizens proposed a renewal of the Arab League Observer Mission with the inclusion of a greater number of non-governmental organization observers and a broadened mandate to go beyond fact-finding and thus to play an active conflict resolution role at the local level in the hope to halt the downward spiral of violence and killing.
On many occasions since, the AWC has indicated to the United Nations, the Government of Syria and opposition movement the potentially important role of non-governmental organizations, both Syrian and international, in facilitating armed conflict resolution measures.
The fighting in Syria, Iraq and parts of Turkey has led to a large number of displaced persons and refugees. The response of governments to the refugee flow has been very uneven, welcoming in a few cases, outright rejection in other cases. The AWC early on called for a UN-led conference on refugees and internally displaced persons. The AWC welcomed and participated in the UN conferences on refugees and humanitarian aid.
The armed conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan have led to serious violations of humanitarian international law: attacks of medical facilities and personnel, the execution of prisoners of war, the use of torture, the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, the deliberate attacks on civilian populations, the use of weapons banned by international treaties. Therefore, the Association of World Citizens has stressed the need for a UN-led conference to reaffirm humanitarian international law. If strong support for international law is not manifested now, there is a danger that violations will become considered as “normal”, and thus will increase. Strong measures of support for humanitarian international law are needed to be undertaken now.
The structures of government, the authority, and the geographic limits of administrative regions, the rights and participation in national life of minorities have been issues in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Appropriate forms of government which allow both for local autonomy and regional cooperation need to be developed. The search for an appropriate structure for those considering themselves to be Kurds has been a particularly difficult issue often leading to violence. The Association of World Citizens which has a decentralization, federalist tradition in the spirit of Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont, has highlighted that federalism and decentralization are not steps toward the disintegration of a State but rather are efforts to find a more just structure of State organization and regional cooperation.
The Association of World Citizens welcomes the 5 April 2017 EU-UN conference on Syria and the region. The Association of World Citizens re-confirms its willingness to cooperate fully in the vast and critical effort for an end to the armed conflict and a development of an inclusive and just society.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
I believe that the One World which is emerging can come into existence only if a New Man comes into being – a man who has emerged from the archaic ties of blood and soil, and who feels himself to be a citizen of the world whose loyalty is to the human race and to life, rather than to any exclusive part of it, a man who loves his country because he loves mankind, and whose views are not warped by tribal loyalties.
Eric Fromm Beyond the Chains of Illusion
Erich Fromm
Eric Fromm (1900-1980), the psychoanalyst concerned with the relation between personality and society, whose birth anniversary we mark on 23 March, was born in 1900. Thus his life was marked by the socio-political events of the century he faced, especially those of Germany, his birth place.
Erich Fromm was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. The families of both his mother and father had rabbis and Talmudic scholars, and so he grew up in a household where the significance of religious texts was an important part of life. While Fromm later took a great distance from Orthodox Jewish thought, he continued a critical appreciation of Judaism.
He was interested in the prophets of the Old Testament but especially by the hope of the coming of a Messianic Age – a powerful theme in popular Judaism. The coming of the Messiah would establish a better world in which there would be higher spiritual standards but also a new organization of society. The Messianic ideal is one in which the spiritual and the political cannot be separated from one another. (1)
He was 14 when the First World War started and 18 when the German State disintegrated – too young to fight but old enough to know what was going on and to be impressed by mass behavior. Thus he was concerned from the start of his university studies with the link between sociology and psychology as related ways of understanding how people act in a collective way.
As was true for German university students of his day, he was able to spend a year or a bit more in different German universities: in Frankfurt where he studied with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory whose members he would see again in New York when they were all in exile, at the University of Munich, at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, and at the University of Heidelberg from where he received a doctorate.
He had two intellectual influences in his studies: Sigmund Freud whose approach was the basis of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and Karl Marx, a strong influence in the Frankfurt School. Fromm chose a psychoanalyst path as a profession, learning and, as was required in the Freudian tradition, spending five years in analysis. Fromm, however, increasingly took his distance from Freudian orthodoxy believing that society beyond family relations had an impact on the personality. He also broke one of the fundamental rules of Freudian analysis in not overcoming the transfer of identification with his analyst. He married the woman who was his analyst. The marriage broke after four years perhaps proving the validity of Freud’s theories on transfers and counter-transfers.
Erich Fromm’s reputation and his main books rest on his concern with the relation of individual psychology and social forces – the relation between Freud and Marx. However, probably the most fundamental thinker who structured his approach was the Buddha whom he discovered around the age of 26. It is not Buddhism as a faith which interested him – Buddhism being the tradition built on some of the insights of the Buddha. Rather it was the basic quest of the Buddha which interested him: what is suffering? Can suffering be reduced or overcome? If so, how?
Fromm saw suffering in the lives of the Germans among whom he worked in the late 1920s, individual suffering as well as socio-economic suffering. For Fromm there must be a link between the condition of the individual and the social milieu, a link not fully explained by either Freud or Marx.
Fromm had enough political awareness to leave Germany for the United States just as Hitler was coming to power in 1933. From 1934, he was teaching in leading US universities. In 1949 he took up a post as professor at the National Autonomous University in Mexico, but often lectured at US universities as well.
Fromm’s work is largely structured around the theme of suffering and how it can be reduced. There is individual suffering. It can be reduced by compassion and love. One of his best known books is The Art of Loving. Love is an art, a “discipline”, and he sets out exercises largely drawn from the Zen tradition to develop compassion toward oneself and all living beings.
There is also social suffering which can be reduced by placing an emphasis not on greater production and greater consumption but on being more, an idea that he develops inTo Have or To Be. Fromm was also aware of social suffering and violence on a large scale and the difficulties of creating a society of compassionate and loving persons. His late reflections on the difficulties of creating The Sane Society(the title of a mid-1950s book) is The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. We still face the same issues of individual and social suffering and the relation between the two. Erich Fromm’s thinking makes a real contribution as we continue to search.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way… It is this spiritual foundation that cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) whose birth anniversary we mark on 26 March was a leading psychotherapist in the humanistic psychotherapy school. He was born in Vienna into a well-established Jewish family; his father was a director at the Austrian Ministry of Social Affairs. He had n early interest in medicine, especially psychotherapy, the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler being hotly debated in the student milieu. He joined the young socialists who were influenced by Alfred Adler’s views that persons were motivated to overcome a negative view of themselves due to class conflicts.
Frankl developed a lasting interest in the nature of suicide and deep depression having worked in the suicide prevention section of the General Hospital of Vienna. Frankl also had a personal interest in philosophy and was attracted to the thinking of the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard and his concept that man had a “will to meaning”. Frankl developed the concept in in 1969 book The Will to Meaning.
In 1937, in addition to his hospital medical work, he started a private practice as a psychotherapist dealing with cases of suicide and depression. He started to develop his ideas on the loss of meaning to life and for the need for life to be pulled by goals as well as drives – drives having been outlined by Freud and Adler.
In 1942, Hitler began his Europe-wide drive for a “final solution to the Jewish question”. In Vienna, Frankl, his parents, his brother,and his recently-married wife as well as himself were arrested and sent to different concentration camps. Viktor Frabkl was in four different camps including Auschwitz which had become a “death factory”.
Frankl was liberated in 1945 and only then learned that his parent, brother and wife had been killed. His experiences and observations in the camps reinforced his thinking on the importance of having a sense of the meaning of life. As he later wrote ” Each man is questioned by life, and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
On being released from the death camp, he wrote in a burst of energy in nine days what became Man’s Search for Meaningsince often translated. It is the work most associated with his name. He wrote a good number of other works, often developed from lectures that he gave in Europe and the USA but none touched as wide a public as Man’s Search for Meaning. He remains as one who stressed the inner push to find a meaning of life and a spiritual core expressed by the voice of conscience.
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Rene Wadlow
Rene Wadlow
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
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Mae La camp for Burmese refugees, Tak, Thailand. (Photo by Mikhail Esteves: Courtesy ofWikiCommons)
On Friday 24 March 2017, the 47-member UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution without a vote ( a consensus-type procedure) to create an international independent commission to study the human rights situation in Myanmar (Burma). The representatives of the Russian Federation and China, who do not like independent investigations anywhere, indicated that had there been a vote they would have voted against but that they would not block a consensus motion. The Ambassador of Myanmar, Hlin Lynn, indicated before the adoption that such a commission was not necessary and that his government would not cooperate. The resolution had been proposed by the members of the Council from the European Union who often have difficulty in reaching agreement among themselves. The fact of their joint action indicates that awareness of the dangerous situation in Myanmar has been growing in the past months.
The creation of an independent commission is the strongest form of pressure that the Human Rights Council has and is rarely used. The most noteworthy commission created concerned the armed conflict and resulting human rights violations in Darfur, Sudan. The government of Sudan did not let the members of the commission into Sudan, but interviews with refugees in Ethiopia and Geneva confirmed the information which representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had been providing the Commission on Human Rights, the ancestor of the Human Rights Council. As I had been the first NGO representative to raise the Darfur situation in 2004 in the Commission on the basis of information from sources that I trusted but without myself having been on the ground, it was a satisfaction to have the Darfur Commission confirm what I had been saying.
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Since I have been addressing the Commission on Human Rights on human rights in Myanmar since 1989, I am not sure that there is much new evidence to be presented, but events can always be updated. In 1992, a Special Rapporteur (then the sharpest tool available to the Commission) on Myanmar was named, Prof. Yazo Yokota of Japan. The government of Myanmar did not cooperate with him but did not attack him either because the government of Myanmar needed trade and investment from Japan. Later Special Rapporteurs on Myanmar who came from less powerful States were attacked by name in the Commission ( a break in diplomatic practice as people are referred to by their title and not their personal name.) I had helped Prof. Yokota meet Burmese exiles in Bangkok. His reports were a model of fact-finding and calls for the appropriate measures of international law, in particular the Geneva Conventions.
In response to Yokota’s report the Commission expressed its “deep concern at the violations of human right in Myanmar which remain extremely serious in particular concerning the practice of torture, summary and arbitrary executions, forced labour, including forced portering for the military, abuse of women, politically motivated arrests and detention, the existence of important restrictions on the exercise of fundamental freedoms and the imposition of oppressive measures directed in particular at minority groups.”
The then Foreign Minister of Myanmar, Ohn Gyaw, had replied to the Yokota report that the government’s aims were “our systematic endeavour towards establishing the democratic system in an atmosphere of peace, tranquility, prosperity and orderly processes rather than under anarchy, disintegration of the nation and tragic and senseless destructive acts. This democratic system we aim to establish will be on foundations that are within the parameters of our history, traditions and culture.”
In early 1992, there was increased pressure against the Rohingys resulting in their massive flight into Bangladesh. Due to pressure from Arab and Islamic States such as Indonesia and Malaysia, which had never been concerned with refugee flows of largely Buddhist “national minorities” to Thailand , a Special Representative of the Secretary-General was named. Thus the fate of the Rohingyas started to be discussed in the Commission on Human Rights.
It is not clear to me why there is the current flair up of violence in Rakhine State on the Bangladesh-Myanmar frontier. In a future article, I will try to set out the causes as I see them. The destructive situation was well set out to the Human Rights Council by the current Special Rapporteur Ms Yanglee Kee earlier in March and by the Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for the Human Rights Council but there was little discussion of causes or possibilities for mutual understanding.
My aim in this article is to welcome the creation of an independent commission on the model of that for Darfur-Sudan but also to warn that data collection is not an answer in itself as the continuing armed conflict in Darfur shows. There are long-standing obstacles to peace and development in Myanmar which require planning within a basic needs framework and then real international cooperation for socio-economic development.
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
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Syrian government forces in urban fighting (Photo: Courtesy of WikiCommons)
On 2 March 2017, the special committee on Syria created by the UN Human Rights Council presented its report in Geneva on the systematic violation of humanitarian international law during the battle of Aleppo. The committee led by Paulo Pinheiro, a respected figure of UN human rights efforts, underlined the deliberate targeting of civilians, attacks on hospitals, the summary execution of prisoners of war, the use of cluster munitions and of chlorine gas – both banned by international treaties. The scale of the violations are such that they can be considered as a deliberate policy and not as events of “collateral damage” in the fog of war. These violations of long-established humanitarian international law are evidence that the laws of war are increasingly being undermined with few governmental reactions
Current armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria-Iraq-ISIS-Turkey, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere have led to repeated and conscious violations of humanitarian international law such as attacks on medical facilities and personnel, killing of prisoners-of-war, the taking and killing of hostages, the use of civilians as “human shields” and the use of weapons which have been banned by treaties.
Thus, there is a pressing need for actions to be taken to implement humanitarian international law in response to increased challenges. Citizens of the World stress the need for a United Nations-led conference on the re-affirmation of humanitarian international law including its application by non-State parties. Non-State actors such as ISIS or the Afghan Taliban, are increasingly involved in armed conflicts but were largely not envisaged when humanitarian international law was being drawn up by governments Thus, the conference would highlight the need to apply humanitarian international law both to States and to non-State actors.[1]
Such a conference would bring together into a coherent synthesis the four avenues of humanitarian international law[2]:
1) The Geneva Conventions – Red Cross-mandated treaties;
2) The Hague Convention traditions dealing with prohibited weapons, highlighting recent treaties such as those on land mines and cluster munitions;
3) Human rights conventions and standards, valid at all times but especially violated in times of armed conflicts;
4) The protection of sites and monuments which have been designated by UNESCO as part of the cultural heritage of humanity, highlighting the August 2016 decision of the International Criminal Court on the destruction of Sufi shrines in northern Mali.[3]
Such a re-affirmation of humanitarian international law should be followed by efforts to influence public consciousness of the provisions and spirit of humanitarian international law. This can be done, in part, by the creation of teaching manuals for different audiences and action guides.[4]
I would cite a precedent for this re-affirmation of humanitarian international law from personal experience. During the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, I was part of a working group created by the International Committee of the Red Cross to respond adequately to the challenges of this conflict which was the first African armed conflict that did not involve a colonial power. The blocking of food flows to Biafra and thus starvation as a tool of war was stressed in our work.[5]
One conclusion of the working group was the need to re-affirm the Geneva Conventions and especially to have them more widely known in Africa by writing Africa-focused teaching manuals. Thus, as at the time I was professor and Director of Research of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, Geneva, I collaborated with Professor Jiri Toman, Director of the Institut Henri Dunant on the creation of such a manual to be used in Africa. Today, such culturally-sensitive manuals could be developed to explain humanitarian international law.
Such a re-affirmation conference would be welcomed by civil society organizations related to relief, refugees, human rights and conflict resolution. A certain number of these organizations have already called attention to violations and the need for international action. There is a need for some governmental leadership for the re-affirmation of humanitarian international law as a basis of world law dealing with the protection and dignity of each person.
References
Andrew Clapham. Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Sydney D. Bailey. Prohibitions and Restraints in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)
Rene Wadlow “Guilty Plea in Cultural Destruction Case” Peace Magazine (Canada) Oct-Dec 2016
Jacques Freymond. Guerres, Révolutions, Croix-Rouge (Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1976) and Thierry Hentsch.Face au blocus. La Croix Rouge internationale dans le Nigéria en guerre(Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1973)
Paul Bonard. Les Modes d’Action des Acteurs Humanitaires. Critères d’une Complémentarité Operationelle (Geneva, CICR, no date given)
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
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Syrian government forces in urban fighting (Photo: Courtesy of WikiCommons)
On 2 March 2017, the special committee on Syria created by the UN Human Rights Council presented its report in Geneva on the systematic violation of humanitarian international law during the battle of Aleppo. The committee led by Paulo Pinheiro, a respected figure of UN human rights efforts, underlined the deliberate targeting of civilians, attacks on hospitals, the summary execution of prisoners of war, the use of cluster munitions and of chlorine gas – both banned by international treaties. The scale of the violations are such that they can be considered as a deliberate policy and not as events of “collateral damage” in the fog of war. These violations of long-established humanitarian international law are evidence that the laws of war are increasingly being undermined with few governmental reactions
Current armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria-Iraq-ISIS-Turkey, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere have led to repeated and conscious violations of humanitarian international law such as attacks on medical facilities and personnel, killing of prisoners-of-war, the taking and killing of hostages, the use of civilians as “human shields” and the use of weapons which have been banned by treaties.
Thus, there is a pressing need for actions to be taken to implement humanitarian international law in response to increased challenges. Citizens of the World stress the need for a United Nations-led conference on the re-affirmation of humanitarian international law including its application by non-State parties. Non-State actors such as ISIS or the Afghan Taliban, are increasingly involved in armed conflicts but were largely not envisaged when humanitarian international law was being drawn up by governments Thus, the conference would highlight the need to apply humanitarian international law both to States and to non-State actors.[1]
Such a conference would bring together into a coherent synthesis the four avenues of humanitarian international law[2]:
1) The Geneva Conventions – Red Cross-mandated treaties;
2) The Hague Convention traditions dealing with prohibited weapons, highlighting recent treaties such as those on land mines and cluster munitions;
3) Human rights conventions and standards, valid at all times but especially violated in times of armed conflicts;
4) The protection of sites and monuments which have been designated by UNESCO as part of the cultural heritage of humanity, highlighting the August 2016 decision of the International Criminal Court on the destruction of Sufi shrines in northern Mali.[3]
Such a re-affirmation of humanitarian international law should be followed by efforts to influence public consciousness of the provisions and spirit of humanitarian international law. This can be done, in part, by the creation of teaching manuals for different audiences and action guides.[4]
I would cite a precedent for this re-affirmation of humanitarian international law from personal experience. During the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, I was part of a working group created by the International Committee of the Red Cross to respond adequately to the challenges of this conflict which was the first African armed conflict that did not involve a colonial power. The blocking of food flows to Biafra and thus starvation as a tool of war was stressed in our work.[5]
One conclusion of the working group was the need to re-affirm the Geneva Conventions and especially to have them more widely known in Africa by writing Africa-focused teaching manuals. Thus, as at the time I was professor and Director of Research of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, Geneva, I collaborated with Professor Jiri Toman, Director of the Institut Henri Dunant on the creation of such a manual to be used in Africa. Today, such culturally-sensitive manuals could be developed to explain humanitarian international law.
Such a re-affirmation conference would be welcomed by civil society organizations related to relief, refugees, human rights and conflict resolution. A certain number of these organizations have already called attention to violations and the need for international action. There is a need for some governmental leadership for the re-affirmation of humanitarian international law as a basis of world law dealing with the protection and dignity of each person.
References
Andrew Clapham. Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Sydney D. Bailey. Prohibitions and Restraints in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)
Rene Wadlow “Guilty Plea in Cultural Destruction Case” Peace Magazine (Canada) Oct-Dec 2016
Jacques Freymond. Guerres, Révolutions, Croix-Rouge (Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1976) and Thierry Hentsch.Face au blocus. La Croix Rouge internationale dans le Nigéria en guerre(Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1973)
Paul Bonard. Les Modes d’Action des Acteurs Humanitaires. Critères d’une Complémentarité Operationelle (Geneva, CICR, no date given)
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
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Malnourished children in Africa. (Photo: Courtesy of WikiCommons)
“Since the hungry billion in the world community believe that we can all eat if we set our common house in order, they believe also that it is unjust that some men die because it is too much trouble to arrange for them to live.”
Stringfellow Barr Citizen of the World (1952)
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in a 22 February 2017 alert has indicated that the States of East Africa – Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Sudan – face famine conditions and that some 20 million people are at grave risk. The most in danger are the people in Somalia and South Sudan where armed violence has destroyed all government infrastructure and thus the possibility of government action. All that remains for action in these two countries are UN staff and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
In the other East African countries, there are government services which can deliver food relief but who can not increase rapidly local food production, local post-harvest storage and the delivery of local products to local markets.
Moreover, the famine conditions in East Africa are closely related to similar food loss in the neighboring countries of the Sahel. As the armed conflicts in South Sudan and Somalia, northeast Nigeria, parts of Niger, northern Cameroon and the Lake Chad area are victims of the Boko Haram violence. Some of the Boko Haram groups in the Lake Chad area have degenerated into bandits with no structured ideology.
In addition to the civil unrest, there is also a strong negative impact of the climate. For three years in a row, there has been a shortage of rain, and the drought weakens an already fragile soil. Even with a return to the usual rainfall, the drought has accentuated soil loss, the lowering of the water table, and the drying up of small ponds where cattle are brought to drink. People move in search for water, often creating tensions between local inhabitants and newcomers.
There may also be longer-range climate change impact – none of which would be positive for greater agricultural production.
The United Nations has asked government for greater contributions in money or surplus food. However, the UN faces a political climate of “ aid fatigue” with constant requests to help with refugee flows, increased peace-keeping forces, and ecological protection.
A central theme which citizens of the world have long stressed is that there needs to be a world food policy and that a world food policy is more than the sum of national food security programs. World food security has too often been treated as a collection of national food security initiatives. While the adoption of a national strategy to ensure food and nutrition security for all in the country is essential, a focus on the formulation of national plans is clearly inadequate.
There is a need for a world plan of action with focused attention given to the role that the UN and regional institutions must play if hunger is to be sharply reduced. It is clear that certain regional bodies, such as the European Union, already play an important role in setting agricultural policy both in terms of production and export policy. There may be a time when the African Union will also play a crucial role in setting policy monitoring and coordinating agriculture.
Today, there is a need for cooperation among the UN family of agencies, national governments, non-governmental organizations and the millions of food producers to respond with both short-term measures to help people now suffering from lack of food and with longer-range structural issues. The world requires a World Food Policy and a clear Plan of Action.
is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.
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Malnourished children in Africa. (Photo: Courtesy of WikiCommons)
“Since the hungry billion in the world community believe that we can all eat if we set our common house in order, they believe also that it is unjust that some men die because it is too much trouble to arrange for them to live.”
Stringfellow Barr Citizen of the World (1952)
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in a 22 February 2017 alert has indicated that the States of East Africa – Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Sudan – face famine conditions and that some 20 million people are at grave risk. The most in danger are the people in Somalia and South Sudan where armed violence has destroyed all government infrastructure and thus the possibility of government action. All that remains for action in these two countries are UN staff and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
In the other East African countries, there are government services which can deliver food relief but who can not increase rapidly local food production, local post-harvest storage and the delivery of local products to local markets.
Moreover, the famine conditions in East Africa are closely related to similar food loss in the neighboring countries of the Sahel. As the armed conflicts in South Sudan and Somalia, northeast Nigeria, parts of Niger, northern Cameroon and the Lake Chad area are victims of the Boko Haram violence. Some of the Boko Haram groups in the Lake Chad area have degenerated into bandits with no structured ideology.
In addition to the civil unrest, there is also a strong negative impact of the climate. For three years in a row, there has been a shortage of rain, and the drought weakens an already fragile soil. Even with a return to the usual rainfall, the drought has accentuated soil loss, the lowering of the water table, and the drying up of small ponds where cattle are brought to drink. People move in search for water, often creating tensions between local inhabitants and newcomers.
There may also be longer-range climate change impact – none of which would be positive for greater agricultural production.
The United Nations has asked government for greater contributions in money or surplus food. However, the UN faces a political climate of “ aid fatigue” with constant requests to help with refugee flows, increased peace-keeping forces, and ecological protection.
A central theme which citizens of the world have long stressed is that there needs to be a world food policy and that a world food policy is more than the sum of national food security programs. World food security has too often been treated as a collection of national food security initiatives. While the adoption of a national strategy to ensure food and nutrition security for all in the country is essential, a focus on the formulation of national plans is clearly inadequate.
There is a need for a world plan of action with focused attention given to the role that the UN and regional institutions must play if hunger is to be sharply reduced. It is clear that certain regional bodies, such as the European Union, already play an important role in setting agricultural policy both in terms of production and export policy. There may be a time when the African Union will also play a crucial role in setting policy monitoring and coordinating agriculture.
Today, there is a need for cooperation among the UN family of agencies, national governments, non-governmental organizations and the millions of food producers to respond with both short-term measures to help people now suffering from lack of food and with longer-range structural issues. The world requires a World Food Policy and a clear Plan of Action.
On 19 September 2016, the UN General Assembly held a one-day Summit on «Addressing Large Movements o Refugees and Migrants» – a complex of issues which have become important and emotional issues in many countries. Restrictive migration policies deny many migrants the possibility of acquiring a regular migrant status, and as a result, the migrants end up being in an irregular or undocumented situation in the receiving country and can be exposed to exploitation and serious violations of human rights.
Citizens o the world have been actively concerned with the issues of migrants, refugees, the «stateless» and those displaced by armed conflicts within their own country. Thus we welcome the spirit of the Summit Declaration with its emphasis on cooperative action, a humane sense of sharing the responsibilities for refugees and migrants and on seeking root causes of migration and refugee flows. There are three issues mentioned in the Summit Declaration which merit follow up action among the UN Secretariat, world citizens and other non-governmental organizations:
The migration of youth;
The strong link between migration, refugee flows, and improving the structures for the resolution of armed conflicts;
Developing further cooperation among non-governmental organizations for the protection and integration of refugees and migrants.
The Migration of Youth
Youth leave their country of birth to seek a better life and also to escape war, poverty, and misfortune. We should add to an analysis of trans-frontier youth migration a very large number of youth who leave their home villages to migrate toward cities within their own country. Without accurate information and analysis of both internal and trans-frontier migration of youth, it is difficult to develop appropriate policies for employment, housing, education and health care of young migrants and refugees. It is estimated that there are some 10 million refugee children, and most are not in school.
Studies have noted an increasing feminization of trans-frontier migration in which the female migrant moves abroad as a wage earner, especially as a domestic worker rather than as an accompanying family member. Migrant domestic workers are often exposed to abuse, exploitation and discrimination based on gender, ethnicity and occupation. Domestic workers are often underpaid, their working conditions poor and sometimes dangerous. Their bargaining power is very limited. Thus, there is a need to develop legally enforceable contracts of employment, setting out minimum wages, maximum hours of work and responsibilities;
The Association of World Citizens recommends that there be in the follow ups to the Summit, a special focus on youth, their needs as well as possibilities for positive actions by youth.
The strong link between migration, refugee flows, and improving the structures for the resolution of armed conflicts.
The United Nations General Assembly which follows immediately the Migration-Refugee Summit is facing the need for action on a large number of armed conflicts in which Member States are involved. In some of these conflicts the United Nations has provided mediators; in others, UN peace-keepers are present. In nearly all these armed conflicts, there have been internally-displaced persons as well as trans-frontier refugees. Therefore there is an urgent need to review the linkages between armed conflict and refugee flows. There needs to be a realistic examination as to why some of these armed conflicts have lasted as long as they have and why negotiations in good faith have not been undertaken or have not led to the resolution of these armed conflicts. Such reflections must aim at improvements of structures and procedures.
Developing further cooperation among non-governmental organizations for the protection and integration of refugees and migrants.
We welcome the emphasis in the Summit Declaration on the important role that non-governmental organizations play in providing direct services to refugees and migrants. NGOs also lobby government authorities on migration legislation and develop public awareness campaigns. The Summit has stressed the need to focus on future policies taking into account climate change and the growing globalization of trade, finance, and economic activities. Thus, there needs to be strong cooperation among the UN and its Agencies, national governments, and NGOs to deal more adequately with current challenges and to plan for the future. Inclusive structures for such cooperation are needed.
A major issue is the use of chemical weapons, probably sarin or a sarin-like substance in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare of which Syria was a party, among the 135 governments which have signed. The attack was also a violation of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction which came into force in 1997. The Convention created The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Syria signed the Convention in 2013 as part of a compromise decision to have its chemical-weapon stock destroyed.
