On November 6

On this day in ...
... 1956, British and French troops captured Port Said and another port in the Suez Canal Zone -- nationalized a few months earlier by Egyptian President Abdel Nasser -- and then declared a ceasefire. At the same time, Israel declared a ceasefire in the Sinai. The BBC reported:

There was a sense of relief at the United Nations headquarters in New York as the Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold announced the allies had accepted the terms of the UN ceasefire and had ordered troops to stop fighting.

An emergency U.N. peacekeeping force would be sent to the region.

(Prior November 6 posts are here and here.)

Ethics & international civil servants

(Dina Francesca Haynes describes her most recent article in this, her 1st IntLawGrrls post)

I began my article, Ethics of International Civil Service: A Reflection on How the Care of UN Staff Impacts their Ability to Fulfill Their Role in "Harmonizing" the World, when I was asked to join an informal working group based out of the U.N. Secretariat. The resultant article explores the extent to which the United Nations must “consider and provide for the mental and emotional well-being of its staff members, particularly those working in the field under extreme stress,” so that these international civil servants can carry out their work to facilitate world harmony.
► The article first discusses the nature and history of the concept of international civil servants, shaped primarily by Cold War mentalities and by the extraordinary leadership of Dag Hammarskjöld, who served as U.N. Secretary-General from 1953 to 1961.
► The second part of the article discusses the composition and goals of U.N. staff today, touching upon staff members’ roles in the protection of human rights in various settings and the struggles with geographic, cultural diversity and gender diversity. A large focus of this section addresses the obstacles to women’s participation in the United Nations and the U.N.’s efforts, only moderately successful, to boost women's participation.
► Part III of the article explores the kinds of ethical issues that arise from the conditions under which international civil service is carried out – conditions that can be very hard on civil servants’ mental and physical health. Staff members who are engaged in field work in a conflict or post-conflict setting, for example, work with traumatized and vulnerable people, who may be victims as well as perpetrators of mass atrocities. Security may be minimal, and daily life may well be filled with “a palpable air of discontent, deep-seated mistrust, hatred, malaise, anger and sadness.” In this challenging setting, staff members are expected to “exercise good judgment with the large discretion granted to them in an environment in which the work is fast-paced and responsive and where the field officer risks becoming accustomed to acting in reactive mode, to perpetually putting out fires.” In this section, I examine the extent to which staff members have access to the tools or resources that would help them thoughtfully choose an ethical course of action under difficult conditions. I draw in part from my own field experience to show that staff members are often not sufficiently prepared to cope with the situations that they will encounter, and do not always make the best choices (to put it mildly) as to how to conduct themselves properly. These factors result in problems like corruption and sexual harassment, along with even more serious problems, such as engaging in the trafficking of human beings and the violent deaths of the very civilians whom U.N. peacekeepers are charged with protecting.
► Finally, the last two parts of the article offer some thoughts on the kind of care and training that are needed to protect the emotional, physical, and mental well-being of U.N. staff members and thus help them to act in an ethical and competent manner in stressful situations.

I conclude with the observation that if the United Nations does not provide a properly protective and caring environment for its staff members, then it cannot “realistically hope to improve the possibility of preventing either burnout, trauma, or ethical misdealings by its staff members under stress.”

On November 30

On this day in ...

... 1943 (65 years ago today), Etty Hillesum perished at Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Given the name Esther when born 29 years earlier in Middleburg, the Netherlands, Hillesum (right) earned a law degree at the University of Amsterdam and then began studying Slavic languages. In 1941 she began to keep a diary of life in Nazi-occuped Netherlands; a year later, expecting to be sent to Camp Westerbork, she asked to be sent there to do social work as a representative of the Jewish Council. She and her family were ordered transferred to Auschwitz in September 1943.

... 1962, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously elected Burmese diplomat U Thant (left) to become the 3d Secretary-General of the United Nations. He had been acting in that position since his predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld, died in a plane crash in September 1961, and would go on to serve until December 1971.

On September 18

On this day in ...
... 1988 (20 years ago today), about 6 weeks after hundreds of thousands had demonstrated in cities across the country, and just over 3 weeks after then-43-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, "daughter of Burma's independence leader stood outside Shwedagon Pagoda" (left) in Rangoon, "and addressed a huge crowd on the need for democracy," military leaders crushed the Burmese democracy movement. Troops fired into crowds, killing many and arresting others. To this day, "[t]he military remains firmly in control" in the country it calls Myanmar.
... 1961, the bodies of 12 persons were found in the wreckage of a plane outside Ndola, a town in Northern Rhodesia (today, Zambia). Among those killed in the crash was U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who'd been on his way to take part in "peace talks following clashes between United Nations peacekeeping troops and forces striving for independence in the breakaway Congolese province of Katanga." The 1961 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded posthumously to Hammarskjöld (right), born 56 years earlier in Sweden; in the words of the BBC, "he did much to raise the profile of the UN and the post of secretary general."

On September 29, ...

... 1960, pounding on the table with both fists, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev interrupted the speech of his British counterpart in praise of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, made during a session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Khrushchev demanded that Hammarskjold "be replaced by a three-man executive representing the western, Soviet and neutral camps." Though Khrushchev continued this attack through the next month, no action was taken. In a plane crash 1 year later Hammarskjöld died, en route to Congo peace talks; he was the posthumous recipient of the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize.
... 2005, Algerians went to the polls to vote on amnesty; that is, on the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, a proposal of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika that they "forget the violence of a civil war that left more than 100,000 people dead and to offer amnesty to many of those responsible." In the end, 97% of voters approved the referendum; turnout was 80%.