International law doesn’t provide for inviolability of borders

11.05.2007 17:54 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ International law doesn’t provide for inviolability of borders. They are marked by international treaties, Ara Papyan, orientalist, specialist in international law and Armenia’s former Ambassador to Canada told a news conference in Yerevan.

“Till 1933 the Republic of Armenia was recognized by the League of Nations according to provisions of the Sevr (Sevres) treaty. Presently, Armenia, as the assignee of the First Republic of Armenia (1918-1920), has every reason to request the UN Security Council to urge Turkey to fulfill obligations undertaken in Sevr,” he said.

As to formation of an independent Kurdish state, it can happen, since provision 62 of the Sevr treaty provides for Kurdistan state on the territory of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and a part of Armenia. We should be ready for it,” the Armenian diplomat underscored.

! Reproduction in full or in part is prohibited without reference to «PanARMENIAN.Net».

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

Genocide exhibit opens at U.N. after compromise reached on killings of Armenians

April 30, 2007
Herald Tribune
Source: The Associated Press

Armenia's U.N. Ambassador Armen Martirosyan said the reference still reflects the truth, "to some extent. This is a Turkish version of history which is not acceptable for us, but to avoid further postponement of the exhibition, we compromised."
[...]
Ban also announced his intention to upgrade the level of the U.N. special adviser on the prevention of genocide, created in 2004, to a permanent position.

UNITED NATIONS: An exhibit on the 1994 Rwanda genocide opened Monday at U.N. headquarters after organizers recast a section on the killings of a million Armenians in Turkey during World War I — a reference that angered the Turks.

The exhibit, originally set to open April 9, was postponed after a Turkish diplomat complained about the mention of the Armenian murders. The section now uses the term "mass killings" instead of "murders," does not include the number of people killed, and replaces "Turkey" with "Ottoman Empire."

Armenia's U.N. Ambassador Armen Martirosyan said the reference still reflects the truth, "to some extent. This is a Turkish version of history which is not acceptable for us, but to avoid further postponement of the exhibition, we compromised."

Numerous calls placed Monday to Turkey's U.N. Mission seeking comment on the changes were not immediately returned.

Historians estimate up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by genocide scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey, however, denies the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

the exhibit, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it was intended to focus on Rwanda and was not a judgment of other incidents.

"This exhibition is about lessons learned from the Rwandan genocide, and does not attempt to make historical judgments on other issues. The United Nations has taken no position on events that took place before the World War that led to the birth of the organization," said Ban.

David Brown, spokesman for the British-based Aegis Trust, which works to prevent genocide and helped organize the exhibit, said his organization still "feels the reference is quite strong."

"The magnitude of the event is still clear in the new wording," said Brown. "We're quite pleased with the outcome."

In a statement, Aegis Trust Chief Executive James Smith said the debate over the representation of genocide around the world is an ongoing process.

"The book isn't closed with one exhibition, but we believe the debates about this exhibition have been helpful in advancing understanding of the issues, and that in itself is a contribution to the cause and the learning process," he said.

The Aegis Trust statement said the exhibit was delayed "after controversy over the exhibition's reference to the Armenian genocide highlighted that the exhibition as a whole had not been subjected to sufficient review within the U.N., prior to approval."

The U.N. confirmed the Turkish complaint when the exhibit was postponed, and said the delay was mainly because the regular review process for exhibits, which takes all positions into account, was not followed.

U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq said Monday that the Turkish objection to the exhibit was not the only one, and other concerns had to be addressed before opening the exhibit. He declined to elaborate.

"The past three weeks have been spent making sure that all the text in the exhibit would be historically accurate," Haq said.

"Lessons from the Rwanda Genocide," sponsored by Rwanda's U.N. Mission, marks the 13th anniversary of the genocide. The exhibit highlights the role of governments in preventing genocide, provides information on warning signals, examines the genocide in Rwanda and emphasizes the plight of victims.

Rwanda's genocide began hours after a plane carrying the country's then-president was mysteriously shot down as it approached the capital, Kigali, on April 6, 1994. More than 500,000 minority Tutsis were killed by Hutu extremists in a 100-day period, which ended after rebels ousted the extremist Hutu government that orchestrated the killings.

Rwanda's U.N. Ambassador Joseph Nsengimana said at the exhibit opening that the international community must "act in a more serious and consistent manner to prevent genocide."

Ban said that since his visit to a genocide memorial site in Rwanda, he has spoken to many colleagues at the U.N. about the failure of the world to act at the time.

"Anybody who goes there cannot come out without crying, without being very humbled about what happened and what the international community failed to react quickly to," he said.

Ban also announced his intention to upgrade the level of the U.N. special adviser on the prevention of genocide, created in 2004, to a permanent position.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

As UN Rewrites Rwanda Genocide Exhibit, Role of France, the Church and Hutu Are In Play, Top Official Says

April 19, 2007
Inner City Press
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN

In his nine-minute response, Mr. Akasaka several times referred to the "mass killing of Armenians." He emphasized that the postponement of the exhibition pained him, personally, since he visited Rwanda shortly after what he called "the massacre."

UNITED NATIONS, April 19 -- The exhibition to commemorate the 1994 Rwanda genocide, which the UN postponed on April 9, was deemed too controversial in its treatment of parties in Rwanda at the time, from France through the church to the UN system itself, according to Undersecretary for Public Information Kiyotaka Akasaka.

While reporting on April 9 and in subsequent editorials has focused on the postponed exhibition's reference to "one million Armenians murdered in Turkey" around 1915, UN associates spokesman Farhan Haq on April 9 said there were other concerns which he refused to disclose.

At the UN on Thursday, Inner City Press asked Mr. Akasaka to explain the postponement of the exhibition, and whether any UN member state -- whether Turkey, Armenia, Rwanda or France -- will be shown the amended text before the exhibition opens.

"I was involved from the beginning," said Mr. Akasaka, who assumed office on April 2, one week before the postponement. He described a process by which an exhibition committee, including the UN Department of Political Affairs, reviewed and approved text for the commemoration. "The text that appeared did not correspond to the one the exhibit committee looked at," Mr. Akasaka said, twice calling this "miscommunication."

"At the last moment, we needed more careful wording of the text," said Mr. Akasaka. "Not because of some demarche by the Turkish Ambassador to me, but because of inaccurate wording and other issues related to the Rwandan genocide.... You cannot blame one party against... I don't want to go into details."

Inner City Press asked for details, whether for example one issue was the role of France. Rwandan president Paul Kagame has recently sued France in the UN-affiliated International Court of Justice, alleging that a French judge has violated Rwanda's sovereignty by issuing warrants for nine Rwandan officials.

Mr. Akasaka to his credit answered this question, and later confirmed that his answer was on the record. He the contested issues included the "role of France, whether you can blame one hundred percent on the Hutu, the role of the Church and other issues we have to look into closely."

It remains unclear if France or the Rwandan government complained to the UN. A comment from the Rwandan mission requested; the mission's counselor Nicholas Shalita has indicated a willingness to discuss the issue, but not before deadline. (The Aegis Trust did not respond Thursday afternoon to a request for comment.) Inner City Press' previous, April 9 request to the Rwandan mission garnered the following quote from Rwandan Ambassador Nsengimana's letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

"I write to you to express the Rwanda Government's profound regret that the exhibit entitled 'Lessons from the Rwanda Genocide,' organized on the occasion of the 13th commemoration of the Rwanda Genocide, has been postponed. It will be recalled that in its resolution 60/225, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General 'to establish a program of outreach entitled "The Rwanda Genocide and the United Nations" as well as measures to mobilize civil society for Rwanda genocide victim remembrance and education, in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide.' The exhibit would contribute significantly to the implementation of the resolution, and would send a strong message about the commitment of the United Nations to preventing genocide. The postponement of the event for reasons unrelated to resolution 60/225 is therefore deeply regrettable."

Inner City Press asked Japan's Deputy Permanent Representative Takahiro Shinyo on Thursday afternoon if Mr. Akasaka has been treated fairly, in being held responsible for the postponement. "Mr. Akasaka came after everything was planned," Mr. Shinyo said. "He is not in a timely situation. But he has to be responsible, he should be accountable" to the press.

Mr. Akasaka has been a spokesman to, and traveled with, the press corps which covers Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On February 9, when Mr. Akasaka was announced as Ban Ki-moon's choice as Under Secretary General for Public Information, Japan's Minister for Foreign Affairs Taro Aso issued a three-point statement that

1. The Government of Japan welcomes the fact that on February 9 (Fri) (US Eastern time), UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Mr. Kiyotaka Akasaka as UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information (Chief of the Department of Public Information).

2. In order for the UN to be reformed into an organization that responds to the modern international community, it is necessary to strengthen constructive coordination with the civilian society, and the task of the DPI is therefore becoming increasingly important. The Government of Japan hopes that Mr. Akasaka will make use of his experience and endeavor toward expanding activities of the DPI.

3. We would also like to pay tribute to the proactive contribution made in the field of disarmament by Mr. Nobuaki Tanaka, Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, whose resignation was announced simultaneously.

The simultaneity of the two Japan-related announcements was widely viewed as confirming that at the UN, the top spots are divided up among the most powerful countries, with Japan as the UN's second largest funder (but without a permanent seat on the UN Security Council) being assured of a post at the Under Secretary General level. While the outgoing USG for Public Information is Indian national Shashi Tharoor, historically at the UN, this post has more often than not gone to a Japanese citizen.

On Friday, April 13, Inner City Press asked Ban Ki-moon's Deputy Spokesperson Marie Okabe (who for what it's worth is also Japanese) about the postponement of the exhibit and the process the UN would follow.

Inner City Press: About this Rwandan exhibit that got canceled... I’ve seen a story that it’s going very soon to be reopened. Can you provide an update as to when it is going to reopen? And also, there is some talk that... Will the language of the new exhibit be shown to the Turkish Mission prior to being put up? The Turkish Mission says that they are not the only country that complained, and I understand that they have complained, I guess, to the Office of the Spokesperson. Could you explain better, why it got cancelled and what steps will be taken before it's redone?

Deputy Spokesperson Okabe: First of all, it was not cancelled -- it was postponed. And at the time that we mentioned that had happened, we said that it was because the review process had not been properly followed. That review is ongoing, which I mentioned to you, and I was hoping that I would be able to announce to you today, when the exhibit would open. I don't have that date today, but I am hoping I will have something in the next couple of days, and our aim is to have the exhibit opened by the end of next week. So while the review process in ongoing, I don't think I can comment further right now.

Inner City Press: In terms of what triggered the postponement, did Turkey or other countries -- and if so, which -- complain?

Deputy Spokesperson Okabe: I work in the Spokesman’s Office and I was not in receipt of any complaints.

Inner City Press: Will DPI show the new exhibit to Turkey or any other…

Deputy Spokesperson Okabe: The review process is under way, Matthew. I don't know right now.

Inner City Press: You will tell us afterwards, then?

Deputy Spokesperson: I will have to ask them.

Whether UN member states have implicit veto power over exhibitions in the UN's public spaces also arose earlier this month in connection with an exhibition in the UN's lower level sponsored by the mission of Georgia, concerning bloodshed in the Abkhazia region in the early 1990s. This exhibition used the words genocide and ethnic cleansing, attributing the latter to the current de facto government of Abkhazia, for whose officials Russia has recently advocated. On April 10, the day after the postponement of the Rwandan exhibition, Inner City Press asked Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin if he had seen Georgia's Abkhazia presentation."Yes," Amb. Churkin replied. "It's one-sided. It's unhelpful... One side is engaged in a massive campaign. But they chose to do it."

"But you don't think that countries should block each other's exhibition," Inner City Press asked.

"I don't want to generalize," Amb. Churkin said. He again called the Georgian exhibit "unhelpful" and "bad propaganda," but said Russia had "decided it was not the situation we should shake the tree."

But how and when can the UN tree be shaken? Inner City Press has been told that while displays in the General Assembly lobby are subject to review by, at least, the Exhibition Committee to which Mr. Akasaka referred, this committee does not review displays in the basement area by the Vienna Cafe, where Georgia's Abkhazia photographs and texts were shown. For that reason, journalists were told that at Georgia's opening of its display, no one from the UN Department of Public Information would be present.

To his credit, still-new DPI chief Akasaka on Thursday answered detailed questions from Inner City Press about the postponement of the Rwanda exhibition. In his nine-minute response, Mr. Akasaka several times referred to the "mass killing of Armenians." He emphasized that the postponement of the exhibition pained him, personally, since he visited Rwanda shortly after what he called "the massacre." At that time, he worked for the UN-affiliated World Health Organization. "We knew something was going on," Mr. Akasaka said. Later in 1994, he stayed at the Milles Collines Hotel. "It still smelled of blood, I feel strongly about this," Mr. Akasaka said, adding that he now expects the genocide exhibition to open not Friday, but "early next week," along with its re-written text.

[...]

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

N.Y. Times Deals a Knock Out Punch to Turkish Denialism

18 April 2007
Rwanda Information Exchange
Source: The California Courier
By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier

In one thoughtless knee-jerk reaction, the Turkish government managed to reconfirm its repressive image among millions of newspaper readers, antagonize the Rwandan government, and upset the U.K.-based Aegis Trust, which had helped organize the exhibition. It also drew the ire of usually mild-mannered Armenian government officials. Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian blasted Ankara by stating: "It is not enough that the Government of Turkey thinks it can hide its history from its own people. Now, they have taken their campaign of cover-up and distortion to such lengths that they will prevent an exhibition on Genocide entitled ‘Lessons of Rwanda.'"

The Turkish Ambassador to the United Nations must have been very proud of himself when he succeeded in temporarily shutting down a U.N. photo exhibition on the Rwandan Genocide, after discovering a single sentence that read: "one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey."

Little did Ambassador Baki Ilkin and his government know that the attempt to eliminate a simple reference which did not even describe the Armenian mass killings as genocide and may have been overlooked by most exhibit visitors, would blow up in their faces in a very big and unexpected way.

As stated previously in this column, Turkey, unintentionally, is the greatest publicist of the Armenian Genocide by its obsessive objections to its mention by anyone, anywhere.

The Turkish complaint against the mention of Armenian "murders" at the Rwandan exhibition was reported by the Associated Press. The lengthy wire story, which extensively described the facts of the Armenian Genocide, was printed by newspapers around the globe. While trying to get rid of one harmless line that most people would not even have noticed, Turkish officials managed to get several paragraphs about the Armenian Genocide published in hundreds of newspapers around the world! As the AP reported: "Historians estimate up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by genocide scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century."

In one thoughtless knee-jerk reaction, the Turkish government managed to reconfirm its repressive image among millions of newspaper readers, antagonize the Rwandan government, and upset the U.K.-based Aegis Trust, which had helped organize the exhibition. It also drew the ire of usually mild-mannered Armenian government officials. Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian blasted Ankara by stating: "It is not enough that the Government of Turkey thinks it can hide its history from its own people. Now, they have taken their campaign of cover-up and distortion to such lengths that they will prevent an exhibition on Genocide entitled ‘Lessons of Rwanda.'"

The New York Times also covered the Turkish objection and the controversy regarding the cancellation of the U.N. exhibition and, just like the AP, made direct references to the Armenian Genocide.

However, the biggest surprise was yet to come. On April 13, The N.Y. Times published a hard-hitting editorial that blasted Turkey's obsessive efforts to deny the Armenian Genocide. It dealt such a devastating blow that Turkish denialism may never recover from it.

The editorial, under the headline, "Turkey and the U.N.'s Cover-Up," stated in part: "More than 90 years ago, when Turkey was still part of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish nationalists launched an extermination campaign there that killed 1.5 million Armenians. It was the 20th century's first genocide.... Turkey has long tried to deny the Armenian genocide. Even in the modern-day Turkish republic, which was not a party to the killings, using the word genocide in reference to these events is prosecuted as a serious crime. It's odd that Turkey's leaders have not figured out by now that every time they try to censor discussion of the Armenian genocide, they only bring wider attention to the subject and link today's democratic Turkey with the now distant crime."

The same editorial appeared in the International Herald Tribune, under an even harsher headline: "Abetting Turkish Denial at the United Nations."

While U.N. officials are mulling over a face-saving way of resuming the photo exhibition, Rwandans, Armenians and all those who cherish the truth should look into the questionable role played by U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq, in this whole episode. He was quoted by AP last week as saying that the photo exhibit was taken down because it was not properly reviewed.

Mr. Haq has also been repeatedly quoted by Turkish denialists as having allegedly stated back in 2000 that "the United Nations has not approved or endorsed a report labeling the Armenian experience as Genocide." Last week, he was quoted by AP as saying: "The U.N. hasn't expressed any position on incidents that took place long before the United Nations was established."

Both of those statements are absolutely untrue, as the U.N. has taken a position on the Jewish Holocaust which, just like the Armenian Genocide, occurred before the establishment of the U.N. in 1945.

Furthermore, there were several extensive discussions of the Armenian Genocide at the U.N. for more than a dozen years, which culminated in a report adopted in 1985 by the U.N. Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.

Earlier in the week, this writer spoke to Mr. Haq and asked him if he was aware that U.N human rights panels had dealt with the issue of the Armenian Genocide. He said he knew that various U.N. human rights bodies had discussed this issue and adopted reports which referred to the Armenian Genocide. Regarding the statement that Turkish denialists constantly attribute to him, he said he had simply stated that there has never been a U.N. General Assembly resolution on the Armenian Genocide.

Armenia's Ambassador at the United Nations may now want to contact the U.N. Secretary General's office and ask him to issue a formal statement declaring that the U.N. human rights bodies had indeed dealt with the Armenian Genocide and adopted a report in 1985 properly calling it a genocide.

There is no question that the Rwandan exhibition will be reopened at the U.N. along with the reference to the Armenian Genocide. By taking it down temporarily to get rid of that reference, Turkish officials have once again inadvertently publicized the Armenian Genocide to a worldwide audience, much beyond the four walls of the U.N.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.

JUST CALL IT REFORM

April 18, 2007
The Telegraph
By K.P. NAYAR

Purging the UN old guard has become an end in itself

Turkey, which has always challenged accounts of Armenian deaths, immediately kicked up a fuss and its permanent representative to the UN said comparisons could not be made between the Armenian issue and the genocide in Rwanda. Tharoor’s successor as under-secretary-general and Armenia’s permanent representative to the UN met and agreed to remove the words “in Turkey” from the offending sentence, but that was not enough. In the end, the opening of the exhibition, which had great emotional resonance with the oppressed peoples of the world, those fighting for civil liberty and campaigners for freedom from fear, had to be postponed.
[...]
In the effort to promote reform, the UN has today lost sight of what constitutes reform. The word has become a euphemism for what each country is seeking within the world body in abject self-interest. Call it reform, and the idea — howsoever base and selfish — becomes respectable. In the process, purging the old guard at the UN has become an end in itself and is hailed as part of the reform process.

Shashi Tharoor, anyone with more than a casual association with the United Nations knew, would be missed in the world body. What many people did not realize was that his absence at the gathering of nations in New York would be felt within days of his departure from the UN. Or that it would be felt so severely as to cast a shadow on mankind’s efforts to atone for its sins through simple, but loud and profound, public gestures by the global organization which was created six decades ago to prevent such sins.

This April marks the 13th anniversary of the genocide of 800,000 Rwandans while the world stood by helplessly. The UN had appropriately decided to mark the anniversary of that tragedy with an exhibition on the 1994 genocide to be opened on April 10 by its secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, coinciding with Rwanda’s official week of mourning. The Aegis Trust, a British organization established seven years ago to prevent genocide in the aftermath of the Rwanda tragedy, was asked by the UN to help out with the exhibition, which was to be set up in the visitors’ lobby of the UN headquarters in New York. The visitors’ lobby is one of the most coveted exhibition spaces in the Big Apple: the serpentine summer-time queues of people that line up on 1st Avenue for guided tours of the historic UN building in 20 different languages pass through this lobby once they clear security. Between 1952 and now, about 38 million people have taken those guided tours. Other visitors to the UN also pass through this lobby. Twenty-nine exhibitions similar to the one that was planned about the Rwanda genocide were held in the lobby last year alone, most of them of at least one month’s duration.

The UN’s department of public information approved the contents of the show on Rwanda and the exhibits were put up behind a veil on April 5, pending the formal opening by Ban. Tharoor headed the highly sensitive and often volatile — as the Rwanda story reveals — department of public information as an under-secretary-general from January 2001 until the end of last month. He has since been succeeded by Kiyotaka Akasaka of Japan, whom Ban appointed to the post on February 9 this year.

Once the exhibits were assembled, but were not yet open to the public, a smart Turkish diplomat sneaked in and spotted something that outraged him. The word “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, with reference to what historians estimate was the mass murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks at the time of the World War I. In a part of the Rwanda exhibition entitled “What is genocide?”, a small panel on Lemkin had the following words: “Following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey”. The panel went on to note that Lemkin “urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes.”

Turkey, which has always challenged accounts of Armenian deaths, immediately kicked up a fuss and its permanent representative to the UN said comparisons could not be made between the Armenian issue and the genocide in Rwanda. Tharoor’s successor as under-secretary-general and Armenia’s permanent representative to the UN met and agreed to remove the words “in Turkey” from the offending sentence, but that was not enough. In the end, the opening of the exhibition, which had great emotional resonance with the oppressed peoples of the world, those fighting for civil liberty and campaigners for freedom from fear, had to be postponed.

When the Americans vetoed India’s nomination of Tharoor as the UN secretary-general, the case that Washington made for supporting Ban was that the world body needed to be cleaned up and that the candidate of India’s choice, who had been with the UN for 29 years could not break from his past and be an effective messenger of reform. That was also Ban’s argument when he demanded the resignations of all assistant secretaries-general and above within days after taking charge.

The unfortunate foul-up over the Rwanda exhibition is an example of how the idea of reform in the UN can be a self-defeating exercise unless it is balanced against continuity. It is not a reflection on Akasaka, a Japanese diplomat who also has excellent credentials as an international civil servant, that things went wrong with the Rwanda effort.

In the effort to promote reform, the UN has today lost sight of what constitutes reform. The word has become a euphemism for what each country is seeking within the world body in abject self-interest. Call it reform, and the idea — howsoever base and selfish — becomes respectable. In the process, purging the old guard at the UN has become an end in itself and is hailed as part of the reform process.

When Tharoor joined the UN as a 22-year-old, young man straight out of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, images of East Pakistani refugees streaming into West Bengal were still fresh in his mind. In 1971, he was a student at St. Xavier’s School in Calcutta and volunteered at a camp for refugees flooding in to escape Pakistani brutality. Appropriately, he joined the UN high commissioner for refugees in Geneva and was posted as head of the UNHCR office in Singapore three years later to tackle the huge Vietnamese “boat people” crisis. His impressionable experience in West Bengal and the initiation in Geneva helped him to go beyond merely pushing the pen, and actually change people’s lives. It is moving to listen to tales from former Vietnamese refugees, who are now successful American and Canadian citizens only because of what the UNHCR office in Singapore did in the Eighties to help them start a new life.

Tharoor’s departure is a loss for the UN because his experience and the circumstances under which he worked for the world body have been somewhat unique. Most international civil servants join the UN and float along causing no more than the tiniest ripples or swim with a tide, in the creation of which they play no part. When Tharoor joined the UNHCR, on an average, five out of six top international stories everyday were about refugees because of the global refugee crisis then.

By the time he moved to UN peacekeeping and became special assistant to the under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations in 1989, the core organizational structure in the UN for such operations was made up of no more than six civilians and three military personnel. But today, peacekeeping is the fastest growing area in the UN. Where there were six civilians and three military officers, there are now 800 specialized personnel. It is not that the UN bureaucracy has grown. Where there was just about one active operation then — although there were several passive ones, such as the long redundant UN Military Observer Group in Kashmir — today there are 60. And UN peacekeeping won the Nobel Prize for what it did in the intervening period.

Few people have their careers shaped by experiences in their early life. Tharoor was lucky to be an exception to the general rule in the 29 years that he served the UN. The only other Indian to have served the UN at such a senior level for anywhere near that length of time was C.V. Narasimhan, who joined the UN as executive secretary to the Economic Commission for Asia and Far East in 1956 and rose to be chef de cabinet to the secretary-general, U. Thant. Narasimhan served Kurt Waldheim as well for a while. If the UN does not want to value Tharoor’s extensive experience, India should. Especially, as the country tries to claim its place in the world body because New Delhi has been particularly lacking in expertise and personal clout at the UN.

There was a time when India had four under-secretaries-general and one assistant secretary-general in the UN. Today it has just two under-secretaries-general in the entire UN system and no Indian is heading any UN agency. That should be some food for thought for South Block as it revives its bid for a permanent seat in the Security Council and stakes its claim for a non-permanent seat, just in case.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.