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Gareth Evans the 68 year old Australia’s former foreign minister and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group and currently Chancellor of the Australian National University has published an article on Project Syndicate titled ‘Valuing the United Nations’ Evans states “No organization in the world embodies as many dreams, yet provides so many frustrations, as the United Nations.  …The peace plan for Cambodia in the early 1990’s, dragged the country back from hellish decades of horrifying genocide and ugly and protracted civil war. Likewise, the Chemical Weapons Convention, steered through the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, is still the most robust arms-control treaty related to weapons of mass destruction ever negotiated. …In 2005… endorsed the concept of states’ responsibility to protect populations at risk of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. With that vote, the international community began to eradicate the shameful indifference that accompanied the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, and too many similar catastrophes. …the UN system’s total cost is still only around $30 billion a year. That is less than half the annual budget for New York City, and well under a third of the roughly $105 billion that the US military has been spending each year, on average, in Afghanistan. Wall Street employees received more in annual bonuses ($33.2 billion) in 2007, the year before the global financial meltdown. The whole family of the UN Secretariat and related entities, together with current peacekeepers, adds up to around 215,000 people worldwide – not a small number, but less than one-eighth of the roughly 1.8 million staff employed by McDonald’s and its franchisees worldwide! …the UN provides fabulous value for what the world spends on it, and that if it ever ceased to exist, we would have to reinvent it. The downsides are real, but we need to remember the immortal words of Dag Hammarskjold, the UN’s second secretary-general: “The UN was created not to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell.”   Inspired by Gareth Evans, Project Syndicate ow.ly/jyVmH Image source Wikipedia ow.ly/jyUWN Valuing the United Nations (April 15 2013)

 

Gareth Evans the 68 year old Australia’s former foreign minister and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group and currently Chancellor of the Australian National University has published an article on Project Syndicate titled ‘Valuing the United Nations’ Evans states “No organization in the world embodies as many dreams, yet provides so many frustrations, as the United Nations.  …The peace plan for Cambodia in the early 1990’s, dragged the country back from hellish decades of horrifying genocide and ugly and protracted civil war. Likewise, the Chemical Weapons Convention, steered through the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, is still the most robust arms-control treaty related to weapons of mass destruction ever negotiated. …In 2005… endorsed the concept of states’ responsibility to protect populations at risk of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. With that vote, the international community began to eradicate the shameful indifference that accompanied the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, and too many similar catastrophes. …the UN system’s total cost is still only around $30 billion a year. That is less than half the annual budget for New York City, and well under a third of the roughly $105 billion that the US military has been spending each year, on average, in Afghanistan. Wall Street employees received more in annual bonuses ($33.2 billion) in 2007, the year before the global financial meltdown. The whole family of the UN Secretariat and related entities, together with current peacekeepers, adds up to around 215,000 people worldwide – not a small number, but less than one-eighth of the roughly 1.8 million staff employed by McDonald’s and its franchisees worldwide! …the UN provides fabulous value for what the world spends on it, and that if it ever ceased to exist, we would have to reinvent it. The downsides are real, but we need to remember the immortal words of Dag Hammarskjold, the UN’s second secretary-general: “The UN was created not to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell.”

 

Inspired by Gareth Evans, Project Syndicate ow.ly/jyVmH Image source Wikipedia ow.ly/jyUWN

Larbi Sadiki the Tunisian writer, political scientist and senior lecturer recalls his meeting with Egyptian Aboul Fotouh in 1992 while a fresh doctoral candidate at the Australian National University. The subject of Sadiki’s investigation at the time was notions of democracy in the discourse of four Islamist movements. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (EMB), Tunisia’s Nahda Party (NP), Jordan Islamic Action Front (IAF), and Sudan’s Islamic Front led then by Hassan Al-Turabi. Sadiki states “Of all of the Islamists I met and engaged with in discussion over democracy during that period, coming soon after the Algerian debacle, Aboul Fotouh was amongst the limited number of interlocutors who felt at ease with that concept and the whole notion of good government. Then, the concept was not as yet popular with most Islamists. Not even the creative Rashid Ghannouchi, whom I sat with and interviewed many times for the purpose of my PhD and beyond, had at the time acquired a firm grip on the term. It was largely considered for being a specifically Western concept underpinned by Western values. At the time, ‘democracy’ in Islamist parlance, lacked the scruples and rigour of shura, Islam’s consultative ethos, even though the likes of the innovative Hassan Al-Turabi in Sudan sought a move towards defining a shura-democracy synthesis.”

 

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/bzInt image source Studiahumana ow.ly/bzI9P

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