Tag Archives: children’s rights

Do We Need The United Nations?

26 Mon Oct 2015

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In May 1959, Dag Hammarskjöld asked the Students Association in Copenhagen, “Do we need the United Nations?” Ever since, we have been periodically returning to that question whenever the UN remains conspicuously absent during a crisis. With enough ongoing crises to merit a sequel to Billy Joel’s 1989 hit, We Didn’t Start The Fire – Syria, drugs, Libya, human trafficking, Yemen, terrorism, Boko Haram, climate change, Afghanistan, water, Kordofan, disease, Somalia, poverty, Balochistan, refugees, South Sudan, hunger, Donbass – the United Nations has not had much positive press. Disenchantment with the Organisation, particularly in the more developed countries, has grown as various crises threaten their prosperity.

This is a very uncharitable and narrow view of the United Nations. There are many areas in which the United Nations been a vital force, many regions where Blue Helmets were the only acceptable foreign presence. The criticism of the UN falls short in that it conflates the two roles the Organisation plays: one as a forum for negotiations and the other as an executive body. Most dissatisfaction with the United Nations, when considered closely, is directed at the second role, the not infrequent failure of the Security Council to live up to our morality. However, it would be myopic to disregard the UN’s unsung successes in the several other aspects of the executive function, not to mention the importance of its negotiating platform.

Although despair at the UN seems to run high among policy wonks, the Organisation enjoys robust support among the public. In a 2011 Gallup poll, the UN registered greater approval than disapproval in 106 of 126 countries surveyed. Overall, 44 per cent of the people surveyed responded positively about the UN while only 17 per cent disapproved. The UN was most unpopular in the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States while its most ardent supporters were from Sub-Saharan Africa; 61 per cent of Qataris disapproved of the UN while 86 per cent of Sierra Leoneans approved of it. This spread is not surprising when seen as indicative of the UN’s successes and failures.

Some of the United Nation’s greatest hits includes food aid to war-torn, impoverished, and famine-struck countries. Since 1961, the World Food Programme (WFP) has been one of the most effective multilateral efforts against global hunger. With a workforce of only 11,500 people, the WFP, on average, feeds some 80 million people in 75 countries. Even better, the group fights to prevent future hunger by helping communities build food assets and providing them education and training in agriculture, food security, procurement, nutrition, logistics, and other related topics. Similarly, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have worked with the international poor by providing them microloans and grants for agricultural activities that not only feed them but also alleviate their poverty. Set up in 1977, IFAD has since reached over 430 million poor rural people.

The United Nations has also led the international effort against diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and polio. Through the World Health Organisation (WHO), Global Fund, and UNAIDS, the United Nations has provided medicines, including antiretroviral therapy, quinine, Rifampicin, Isoniazid, Salk vaccine, and sulfa drugs to millions of people; over 500 million insecticide-treated nets have been distributed to prevent malarial outbreaks. The UN has worked with other organisations and governments to raise funds, heighten awareness, and establish systems and protocols to prevent and fight epidemics. The successful campaign to eradicate smallpox is a testimony to the enormous work that has been put in by the UN, its affiliates, and cosponsors towards global health.

The cause of women and children has found a strong advocate in the United Nations. Expertise in mother and child health, family planning, and preventing sexually transmitted diseases has been shared with more than 100 countries via affiliates like the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Definitive measures were taken to create sources of clean water and improve sanitation and nutrition. The Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has made great strides in promoting literacy and protecting children against exploitation. The United Nations has been an important forum in drafting international conventions to remove discrimination against women in the political, civil, economic, social, and cultural life. Women and children are among the worst affected by human trafficking and the narcotics trade. The Global Initiative to Fight Trafficking (UN.GIFT) works to foster awareness, consolidate global support, and counter trafficking in consultation with governments. A trust fund supports victims’ rehabilitation. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) provides states technical expertise on illicit drugs and detection to help law enforcement; it also provides legal services to help draft and implement domestic and international legislation to thwart the influence of narcotics on institutions and society.

The United Nations has developed impressive credentials in holding and monitoring elections. Just in the last 25 years, the United Nations Department of Political Affairs (UNDPA), through its Electoral Assistance Division (UNEAD), has provided technical, logistical, and other support to Cambodia, Iraq, El Salvador, East Timor, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Congo, South Africa, and Nepal to conduct free and fair elections. The UN has participated in over 300 projects in the same time period, at times in locations where the only foreign presence acceptable was the international organisation.

Credit must also be given the United Nations for attempting to create a legal framework for war crimes and genocide. A sensitive issue inextricably tied to national honour and sovereignty, input is taken from several sources – states, individuals, advocacy groups – and progress depends on nearly unanimous decisions of several parties. There has been some success, admittedly slow, on tribunals covering the erstwhile Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia but funding is another hurdle.

Among the most visible activities that the United Nations performs is peacekeeping. In fact, the role is almost synonymous with the United Nations and seen as the raison d’etre for its formation in 1945. The Blue Helmets deserve credit for going into countries in which no one else had any interest. In several cases, neighbouring states were themselves too weak and divided to contribute to regional security. In Congo, Liberia, Kosovo, or Burundi, for example, the only alternative to UN peacekeepers would have been slaughter and mayhem. Most problems arising in UN peacekeeping operations are a result of vague mandates and the difficulty of managing troops from so many different sovereignties and varying capabilities and training. Currently, the United Nations is involved in 16 peacekeeping missions worldwide with an internationally contributed force of slightly over 118,000 troops, police, and civilian personnel. In many of these places, the UN is the most reliable institution on the ground.

Often underestimated is the United Nations’ presence as a forum for informal discussions on several issues of regional or international importance such as the removal of landmines, disarmament, nuclear proliferation, internet privacy, or climate change. The United Nations may not always take the lead in such discussions but the assembly of a permanent diplomatic conference facilitates low-key negotiations between parties in bilateral or even multilateral settings. Diplomats assigned to the New York office develop wide-ranging contacts and come to understand each other on a personal basis. Such anonymity and flexibility of exchanges are a great service to international diplomacy: their lack of publicity should not be taken to suggest that they are unimportant. On the contrary, the exact opposite is the case.

The most acrid criticism of the United Nations is reserved for its other most visible role – that as a security provider. The UN Security Council’s (UNSC) numerous failings are often cited as an indication that the UN has not lived up to its most important task. However, it must also be borne in mind that the United Nations was not created as a global gendarme, and there are practical as well as conceptual problems associated with demanding such a role. The Organisation is a collective of states and it is only with their permission that it can act on behalf of the world community. The United Nations has no independent army nor an economy by which to procure such an army; it depends on the contributions of its members to function in a military or civilian capacity.

The use of military force by the United Nations must have the support of all the Great Powers and the majority of the Security Council. Without this high standard of congruence, Hammarskjöld warned, no military action has an effective foundation with which to act. Furthermore, without such unanimity, the United Nations is susceptible to being transformed into a military alliance in a conflict between the Powers. The intervention in Korea demonstrated how dangerous such action could be if taken only by a simple majority of members. The United Nations was never designed to be an organ of collective security such as one of the alphabet soup of alliances the United States created during the early Cold War to contain the Soviet Union; rather, the aim was to create a universal system through which peace and other common goals may be pursued.

If the failings of the Great Powers diminish the UN, then it is a reflection of the prevailing world order and abandoning the Organisation will hardly contribute to peace and stability. Ultimately, though the nations of the world come together at the United Nations in false equality – one country, one vote – the Security Council is a reminder of global economic and military wherewithal. The UN is not truly an idealistic organisation as many suppose but a fairly pragmatic one, infused with just a little hope for a better tomorrow. To write off the UN because of difficulties or a few failures, Hammarskjöld reminded his audience in 1959, would mean, among other things, “to write off our hope of developing methods for international coexistence which offer a better chance than the traditional ones for truth, justice, and good sense to prevail.”

This past weekend, the UN crossed 70. I, for one, hope it has as many more.

Protecting Our Children…from Ourselves?

09 Sun Dec 2012

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Another Indian couple were recently the subject of a visit from Norway’s Child Welfare Services last week. Almost a year ago, Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya attracted attention with their dysfunctional domestic situation and its impact on their children, and last week, Chandrasekhar and Anupama Vallabhaneni were sentenced to jail by the Oslo District Court for child abuse. Apart from the comical value of watching the Indian media initially froth at their “patriotic” mouths over the cultural insensitivity of the Norwegians towards Indian citizens and then eat humble pie when all the facts came out, these events have sparked off a debate on parenting in India: is it okay for children to receive corporal punishment?

As a disclaimer, it should probably be stated at the outset that I am not a parent. It should also be noted that I went through school systems which did not prohibit corporal punishment, and that this post is based only on informal conversations with a few teachers in an unofficial capacity, all of whom had been teaching for at least ten years, a couple for almost thirty. Some of the teachers are at prestigious residential schools, and all of them at reputed public schools (in the old British sense). The input of a few parents has also informed this post, mostly from an upper middle class background, though none are employed in child-related activities.

One problem in speaking about corporal punishment is that it is used to describe practices across a wide spectrum of schools and socio-economic conditions. This camouflages other serious dysfunctions in various schools and school districts – lack of funds, poor quality of teachers, caste bias, etc. Many of these difficulties do not exist or do so at a significantly lower level in, say, elite public schools. No one doubts for a moment the occasional barbarism that we hear of in rural schools that leaves children maimed, even dead, due to a beating by a person of authority. While one can certainly focus on the immediate cause, the beating, we would be remiss if the larger picture were ignored. Who was this person? Why was the beating so severe? What other factors played into the situation? Chances are that the excessive violence had little to do with corporal punishment and a lot to do with the perpetrator’s unworthiness.

In better schools, not necessarily elite public schools, such excesses are almost unheard of. These schools use a range of punishments and positive reinforcements as part of their educational approach. Depending upon the infraction, different strategies are applied; punishment could range from writing impositions, standing facing a wall, loss of privileges, verbal admonishment, detention, kneeling down, and, as a last resort, caning. Schools have, until now, worked on the English common law principle of in loco parentis, that is, the school acts in the place of a parent in a child’s best interests. Children have a fiduciary relationship with their parents, which the school takes over while the child remains on campus. It is with this understanding that teachers discipline their wards. Interference in this system, however well-intentioned, weakens the teacher’s authority over the children and has a generally negative fallout.

One aspect of this negative fallout is that teachers, too afraid to even speak harshly to students, stop caring. If a ninth grader is caught smoking or bullying, many teachers prefer to look the other way, for there is little else they can do. Scolding or caning is now unacceptable, and parents blame the school for ineffective discipline if called in by the principal. If a student does not do the homework assigned, teachers hesitate to raise their voices for fear of administrative consequences against them. If a child fails a test, parents blame the teachers and the school – the onus for poor academic achievement has now passed entirely onto teachers but they are not allowed a free hand in their task. As a result, many teachers have thrown the responsibility of caring for the children back onto the parents – they suffer the children for the few hours they are in school and then send them back home, regardless of whether they have learned anything or not.

My school had its annual reunion for Old Boys recently. Students who had graduated over 25 years ago attended, as did a few who had finished high school barely five years ago. As we walked through the campus, we reminisced about our bygone immortality – successes, triumphs, disappointments, friendships, rivalries, crushes. We remembered our teachers, the sweet ones as well as the strict ones, and who had been caught and punished for what offence. My bête noire had been French literature – it takes a lot to make an eighth grader translate four to six pages of Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, or Gustave Flaubert thrice a week, and I was caned with a bamboo stick on my palms quite regularly. Today, I thank him for forcibly exposing me to the arts; in the ‘PCM’ culture of India, I might have well lost out on the beauty of life. I was not the only one who felt this way – not one of us harboured any resentment; in fact, we were thankful for the tough love we received in our formative years. In fact, many of us actively sought out a few teachers who had retired and were too old to come to the reunion but were living in the vicinity. Many remembered our names (and even embarrassing stories of mischief we committed!) and inquired with interest about our careers and families. Just this weekend, my father’s school celebrated a 50th year reunion for his batch. Interestingly, his experience at the reunion was a mirror image of the reunion at my school.

One thing that is lost in the talk of all this violence against children is the love and care teachers also show their wards – or used to before the new science of parenting kicked in. One parent told me of an incident that happened in his school: it was the late 1950s and the heyday of Nehruvian deprivation. One of his classmates in the eighth grade, whose family were recent refugees from Kashmir, had fallen on very hard times and one day just stopped coming to school. After a few days, the headmaster visited their home, and the teary-eyed boy told him that they could not afford to pay the school fees anymore. After a moment of thinking, the teacher replied, “Don’t worry – I’ll pay your fees from now until you can afford them again.”

I have heard and seen many such stories, but they do not make the newspaper headlines as we have become connoisseurs of misery and prurience. There used to be a time when teachers cared above and beyond the call of duty, but I am not sure if those teachers exist any more – new-fangled, legally heavy theories of parenting and school discipline have made them an endangered species. Parenting – be it at home or at school – is an ocean of gray. Trying to create legal boundaries in this is an asinine project at best, and the first signs of failure are already showing as more and more neighbours (rarely the parents, for as they say in Marathi, aaple cha brihaspathi, doosra cha shemda!) are wondering when children became so rude and irreverent.

Only experts can mess things up so badly, and somewhere down the line, schools became glorified daycare centres. Parents are too busy with their careers and social service agenda to be parents; the school’s role is now to keep the young ones off the streets for a few hours a day and serve as someone to blame for academic and social failure of the children. Not only has there been a crackdown on corporal punishment, but the new fad is to do away with examinations until a later age lest poor performance damage a child’s fragile psychological state. One brave Bangalore school which did away with any sort of examinations until the eight grade and retains students in the same year only if they fail five or more subjects has seen the number of failures in the eighth grade balloon from around three two decades ago to about 25 now.

Education is not the issue in this post, but this example also underscores how the new agenda undermines in children not only a healthy respect of authority but also the law of consequences. Actions have consequences, and some actions have severe consequences. If school were merely a matter of trigonometry, Shakespeare, and Shivaji, they would not be needed, for all those would be available at the corner library. Schools teach children something more – values. They teach children appropriate social interaction; they inculcate morals such as not cheating, with punishment if necessary; they also impart, through peers or teachers, an understanding of the consequences of violating norms of acceptable behaviour. At 13, I might have got away without doing my French homework, but at 23, my boss will not operate under the same kid gloves rules and have no compunction in firing me. If schools are not allowed to prepare children for life, then what is their purpose?

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that psychology is not a strict science, its claims that corporal punishment and failing in competitions at a young age would be hurtful to a child is not evident in millions of people who grew up in such systems. What seems to matter is that previous generations of students knew that the punishment they received from teachers or parents was out of a desire to improve them, not hurt them. It is that unconditional acceptance and love from our family that is the key to healthy development of a child; a spanking for stealing candy becomes immaterial.

There is indeed a danger of violence beyond the realm of discipline, but to abandon corporal punishment instead of addressing other issues seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If spanking is seen as an indicator of severity of the infraction and a child feels confident that it is loved, there is little problem. However, if the child is affected by a dysfunctional relationship between its parents, bias in school, or any other such problem, even a minor reprimand could have magnified consequences. Is the assault on corporal punishment a convenient scapegoat to hide our own failures as parents and human beings?