Link 1995 10 (Vol. 45, No. 3).pdf - DRC Home - Wilmington College

disputes, but you need ways of managing
disputes, peaceful settlement of disputes
and of treating crisis situations and complex
human emergencies when they arise," he
added, noting a commitment to a "new
global partnership" is required to accomplish
these monumental tasks.
Collett said nation-building and sustainable
development will cost money, and
if developing countries take the same course
of extravagant energy use and degradation
of the environment utilized by First World
countries in order to become modernized,
"then we're all going down the tubes together."
He also sees the United Nations' peacekeeping
role via military operations as evolving
to become one of exclusively protecting
and providing assistance to people entangled
in what he describes as "complex human
emergencies," which could be anything from
a natural disaster to a war that breaks out
between countries or within a country.
"We are now at the dawn of a new era
that is extremely exciting and interesting in
which the military has a completely revised
role not to go to war in aggressive action to
take land or enforce the desire of one coun­
try upon another," he said, noting the end of
the Cold War offers chances for an era of
cooperation that was nonexistent during the
UN's first 45 years
"When there w; is a problem someplace,
both the East and West would be trying to
get as much out of it as they could — often
with a legacy of arms and despotism," he
said. "Well, now they are not in that business
any longer.
"I think what is exciting right now is
that, coming out of the Cold War, things
have opened up anc the UN can be more of
what the charter su| gests can be done by an
intergovernmental body," he added.
Collett said the UN has gotten itself
into serious trouble n hot spots like Somalia
and Bosnia, where its action has not been
well-coordinated or its mission well defined.
He would prefer to have seen the UN
role be more attuned to that of supplying
aid, and as a buffer between rival factions.
While Bosnia has been less than a resounding
success, he said the UN has engaged
in more than a dozen peacekeeping
operations since 1989, and at least 13 of
those — in places like Cyprus, Kashmir and
the Middle East — have been very impor­
Ideas 'Begin to Bloom 1
As the Quaker UN representative and
director of the Quaker United Nations Office
at UN headquarters in New York,
Stephen W. Collett and his staff seek to
bring Quaker viewpoints and influence to
bear on policy-making between governments.
"Our mandate is to support the process
of the United Nations," Collett said. "There
are several hundred years of Quaker history
in working with problems of conflict, and
we try to bring those perspectives to people
working on the UN problems."
The program, which is sponsored jointly
by the Friends World Committee for Consultation
and the American Friends Service
Committee, hosts Quaker House in both
New York and Geneva, where staff can
convene off-the-record meetings for diplomats
and United Nations Secretariat, providing
informal but structured discussion of
critical issues.
"Quaker House is very well known and
we are often approached and asked, 'Could
the Quakers organize a meeting on this or
that?'" Collett said. "We host lunches, teas
and weekend conferences, often on very
critical areas of negotiations where we can
get them for an off-the-record sort of prenegotiating
phase to work out problems.
"Quaker House is a place where ideas
begin to bloom."
In the last yeai, he has organized two
weekend conferences on the topic of reform
of the UN Security Council with goals of
increasing its size and enhancing procedures
and working methods. Collett's wife,
Berit, who also is a program person in the
office, organized a conference on preparations
for the fourth World Conference on
Women, which occ arred in Beijing, China,
this September.
Collett said Quakers were very much a
part of the establishment of the United Nations
in San Francisco 50 years ago, as they
had been involved with encouraging this
at Quaker UN
tant in maintaining peace, even if a final
peace has not yet reached fruition.
In addition to the ever-present peacekeeping
emphasis, Collett said the area of
environmental issues should prove to be a
primary rallying point for the United Nations
into the next century, as more and
more countries implement environmentfriendly
policies. He also feels it will produce
a positive economic impact on both
developed and developing nations.
"I believe this will be good for our
society — it's going to feel good," he said.
"You see this in children when they identify
with endangered species and recycling, because
it makes sense to them and they feel
plugged into a world in which otherwise
they would not.
"And it's going to be good for business.
It means the next wave of the industrial
revolution is going to be one of environmentally
sound, sustainable products — cars
that don't pollute, new chemicals that don't
hurt the ozone layer," he added.
"B ut we' re going to have to do it around
the world, not just in Wilmington, Cincinnati
or the United States — we can't do it
alone," he said. "Those are the challenges."
kind of international organization for peace
with Woodrow Wilson's ill-fated League of
Nations after World War I.
In fact, the original concept of the United
Nations can be traced as far back as the
seventeenth century when, in the early days
of the Quaker movement, William Penn
wrote, in 1693, an essay on the peace of
Europe and how to establish a council where
governments would meet regularly and talk
about their problems instead of just going to
war over them, Collett said.
A passage from Penn's landmark essay
reads: "It were a great motive to the tranquility
of the world that they might freely
converse face to face."
Collett said Quakers have supported
that idea ever since.
"What people need to do is to meet and
talk and put their heads together about problems
and come up with joint responses and
common approaches to problems," he said.
"That's the idea behind the Quaker UN."
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