Interventions (31 page)

The second impact has been in accountability. The MDGs, and their standardized rating system for evaluating progress in development contained in their simple and universally accessible aspirations, have provided a mechanism for civil society in all parts of the world to hold governments to account. This did not exist before, and the universal standard set by the goals has allowed an international community to emerge in transnational solidarity, further empowering people to raise their voices and demand results. The outcome has been a new momentum for good governance in the developing world, with, as Jeff Sachs put it, dozens of governments now forced to “watch themselves in the mirror” of poverty, hunger, disease, infrastructure, and education.

The third major impact of the goals has been to set up a global system for tracking change and enabling comparison. This has allowed vital lessons to be transferred across the international development community of practitioners, activists, and those crying out for assistance. This and the simple and accessible nature of the goals have, for example, allowed a popular appreciation for the enormous benefits wrought by the expansion of capitalism in the East Asian economies, particularly in China. China's poverty rate dropped from 60 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2005, demonstrating the value of its economic policies for transforming the livelihoods of the poor. Meanwhile, the failures in other countries, such as Guinea-Bissau, have allowed a clearer contrast and exposure of their situation, focusing attention on those cases so that strategies for changing their fortunes can be devised. This level of comparison and cross-fertilization in the developmental learning process has extended to the microdetail of individual projects also, allowing the transfer of methods, approaches, and technologies among countries and organizations on all kinds of development activities, from the successes and impact of school feeding programs in West Africa to unusual strides against tuberculosis in Nepal.

Fourth is the impact on cohesion. The MDGs are focused on results, themselves centered upon the impact on individuals. This has wiped away much of the friction between developmental paradigms that had previously divided and so impeded international development. It has brought a level of cohesion to international development efforts unheard of before 2000. International development work has always been made up of an array of fractious groups, between ideologically divided NGOs and businesses, with disagreements extending even to the point that institutions like the IMF and World Bank were seen as the “real enemy.” The MDGs have ended much of this destructive squabbling. Rather than focusing on the means of development, which were deeply contested, the MDGs focused entirely on the ends of development.

Placing the individual at the heart of the agenda has eroded this debate, forcing a realization of the collective contribution that can be made by the full array of parties. This has allowed a global framework of cooperation, further galvanizing the attention and contribution of other actors on specific MDGs, particularly the private sector. The impact of the MDGs in providing this coherence has not just secured the de-confliction of certain development paradigms, but also the self-mobilization of a new range of contributors to poverty eradication.

The MDGs also come in for criticism in debates regarding development aid. Some are of the view that aid does no good and is frittered away by corrupt governments, or that aid can actually do harm. They quite rightly question the impact of, for example, over $1 trillion of aid transferred this way to Africa over the last fifty years. Between 1970 and 1998, when the majority of these transfers were made, the share of the world's poor people living in Africa rose from 11 percent to 66 percent. The implication is that aid is without value and should end. Trade and private investment should replace it, the argument goes, given these have proved the prime means through which countries have achieved sustained economic development in the modern age.

There are significant flaws in this argument that must be exposed. First, the characterization of aid as without value is based primarily on pre-1990 figures, when most of the total aid sum was transferred. These figures utterly misrepresent the current role of aid. There is a fundamental difference between development aid given during the Cold War and aid given since. Before 1990, most aid money was designed to buy allegiance in the context of the superpower struggle, not international development. Foreign donors showed little interest in the ruling styles of the benefactors and saw no reason to hold them to account for corruption. Aid is now far more closely tied to conditions on its use, such as in the Millennium Challenge Account. The argument against the value of aid might have been a reasonable one if made in 1975. It is more than outdated today.

Furthermore, aid does not necessarily mean rampant corruption; it depends on leadership and the accountability of those leaders. Rwanda, for example, has received significant foreign aid and experienced minimal levels of corruption—the curse of so many other developing countries.

Private investment and international trade also cannot replace aid for most poor nations. Such countries simply lack the features required to breach the threshold of cost-competitiveness in the international economy that is required for investment. Skills and services, infrastructure, an educated workforce, political stability, and other features of social and economic development are required before this can happen, and the only way to get there in most cases is through the effective application of aid in the first instance.

The goal, of course, should be the end to aid. We should be striving for a world where aid is no longer necessary. South Korea is an example of a country that used to be a major recipient of aid but is now a serious donor. This is the example we should be seeking to emulate in all developing countries, and such a result is possible only through aid and then a follow-through of private investment and trade.

The spotlight should not be on aid but on trade. It should really be on the failures of rich countries to remove international trade regulations that stunt the economic ambitions of developing countries. Such policies are entirely at odds with the professed international development agenda of wealthy countries. Subsidies protecting the agricultural sectors of rich countries are most damaging of all, as they make it impossible for developing nations' agricultural sectors to break into the rich markets. The debate should not be on whether we should have aid, but on the appropriate policies to effectively concoct the right mixture of aid, conditionality, good governance, and, most of all, opportunities in international markets—with the latter hitherto a black mark on the community of wealthy states.

Enormous progress has been made in some areas of the MDGs. For example, the target to halve the number of people living on $1 or less per day—lamented as excessively ambitious in 2000—is likely to be achieved, largely as a result of rapid economic growth in the Asian economies, particularly China's. Furthermore, some countries have made significant strides on many of the MDGs. The latest estimates are that nine African countries will succeed in halving the number of people living on $1 or less per day. Yet now that we are approaching 2015 and the deadline of the MDGs, it is clear that most of the global targets will not be met.

The failure to reach the MDGs does not signify a failure of
the MDGs themselves; the failure is in our effort to achieve them. The MDGs are not a strategy requiring adjustment or replacement in the face of failure. Instead, they represent undeniable and fundamental rights for all human beings. Therefore, they must remain enshrined as the object of the collective endeavors of humankind. Beyond 2015, any adjustments should not be in the goals, but in the individual targets, taking account of changes and allowing ambitions to be raised accordingly, and in the measures we apply to achieve them.

Furthermore, huge advances have been made in pursuit of and as a result of the MDGs. The ultimate goal is the eradication of extreme poverty, but along the way the goal is also to make things better—to do whatever we can do. The MDGs can continue to do this beyond 2015.

There is a real danger in opening up the MDGs for renegotiation. In my experience, every time you open up a progressive international measure for renegotiation, the result is typically not a progressive outcome but a whittling away of the ambitions. Some may wish, quite rightly, that the MDGs contained more. But we should not risk the hemorrhaging of any of their components.

There are new threats to the MDGs that either did not exist or did not appear in so prominent a form when they were drafted. These include the international narcotics trade, climate change, and the global economic crisis. Consideration for these must be incorporated firmly into the next stage of the war on poverty. The international narcotics trade has taken on a new level of power and ingenuity in the developing world and threatens the reversal of development in the countries in which it takes root. International cooperation to prevent, contain, and erode networks of organized crime is essential for the protection of development in some of the most fragile countries.

Of far more significance, however, is the enormous matter of climate change. The impacts of climate change are already with us, and changes in weather patterns and further rises in sea levels are now inevitable. Support must be given to the poor countries that stand to suffer so that they can respond to these changes and prepare for what is to come. Without such a globally shared effort, all the hitherto on-the-ground progress in international development could be lost to this threat.

Finally, there is the global economic downturn following the financial crisis incurred by the credit crunch. This crisis is threatening a major and sustained reduction in donor support for international development. The MDGs were launched in an era of increasing prosperity in the rich world, but we should not be fooled into believing that these hard times should necessarily mean especially hard times for poverty eradication. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, provides examples from history demonstrating that it is not so much the abundance of resources that is the prime determinant of outcomes for the poor, but the values underpinning their use. During the Second World War, the resources available in Great Britain fell throughout the conflict, particularly in the net availability of food. But (excluding war-related deaths) nutritional health and life expectancy actually
rose,
and did so dramatically, across the population during the war years. Rather than a decline in care and the state of the vulnerable, the deprivations of war spurred new supportive and sharing social arrangements leading to a radical transformation in the food-distribution and health care systems, with dramatic results. The difference was driven by something very simple: a change in attitudes to sharing.

This is a vital lesson to take to the years of economic downturn and the tightening of budgets. For it casts our responsibility in a different light, posing this dilemma not as a question of resources but as a question of our will and our attitude to the sharing of the resources we have.

The ultimate lesson of the story of the MDGs is that we are all responsible.

VII

THE WORLD'S FAULT LINE

Peacemaking in the Middle East

Y
ou give me settlements and I'll give you Arafat,” Chris Patten told Colin Powell. It was 2004, and we were in a meeting of the Quartet, where the UN, the United States, the European Union, and Russia had coordinated Middle East policy since I had brought them together three years earlier. Patten, the EU commissioner for external relations, was responding to Powell's call for the rest of us to join Washington in isolating the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. If the United States wanted others to sideline Arafat, would Washington insist that Israel stop expanding settlements?

“That's a very interesting offer,” Powell replied in his usual pragmatic manner. Maybe he was wondering whether he could deliver Washington on a deal like this, to say nothing of the Israelis. The issue soon became moot when Arafat died that November. But I admired Patten for insisting on a quid for the rather far-reaching quo we were being asked to sign on to. Decades of attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally came down to this: a recognition by Israel of the need to end the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and accept a two-state solution negotiated on the basis of the 1967 borders; and a decision by the Palestinians—and their leader—irrevocably to accept the existence of the State of Israel and surrender the illusion that a Palestinian state could be achieved by stoking Israel's sense of insecurity.

I had heard Washington's mantra many times: “Arafat's the problem.” I agreed that Arafat's
behavior
was a big problem. Suicide attacks by Palestinian militias had killed hundreds of Israeli civilians during the intifada that had raged since 2000. I had always taken a clear stand against terrorism, from the Palestinians or anyone else. I refused to accept that it was “legitimate resistance” to blow up Israelis on buses or fire rockets at random toward civilian towns. Arafat was not doing enough to stop these atrocious attacks. Indeed, the apparatus he headed was sometimes complicit in them. In person, Arafat could be compelling—but he could also be completely unreliable. He would casually assert things that he knew that I knew could not be true, and he built a corrupt and confused authority beneath him. I had at times instructed my own envoys to minimize contacts with Arafat to register my displeasure at his equivocation—not easy given the intimate relationship between the United Nations and the Palestinians.

But was Arafat the
only
problem, as Washington insisted? What about Israel's expansion of settlements on Palestinian land and its annexation and isolation of East Jerusalem? These actions violated international law, discredited Palestinians who advocated nonviolence, and ate away at the territorial basis for a viable Palestinian state. Besides, what was the alternative to Arafat? I never forgot that he was the leader who had brought his people to accept the idea of a two-state solution, relinquishing their territorial claim to 78 percent of mandate Palestine, and had signed the Oslo Accords, which recognized Israel. If he was sidelined, the field would be open for Arafat's militant Islamist rival, Hamas. Could anyone seriously want that as an outcome? The Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously said that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, but the Israelis and the Americans continually tried to marginalize one group of interlocutors on the Arab side only to find them replaced by an even more recalcitrant opponent.

In short, if Arafat was a problem, Ariel Sharon was too. The Israeli prime minister showed few signs of offering true justice or dignity for Palestinians. He deployed the Israeli army not only to rout out militants but to dismantle the political and security structures of the Palestinian Authority. He had smothered the Palestinians with checkpoints and was building a wall that, whatever its stated security purpose, cut through the heart of Palestinian land on a route that the International Court of Justice ruled illegal. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Sharon would tell me. “True,” I would reply, “but only if the fence is not built through your neighbor's land.”

Instead of debating who were the good guys and the bad guys, I thought the international community had to recognize that the parties were trapped in a tragic logic. They would never be able to overcome their predicament without robust international help. We needed to work together, deploy incentives, and apply real pressure to help both sides to cease self-destructive behavior patterns and negotiate an agreement.

This was easier said than done and raised many dilemmas. What was my proper role as secretary-general? When should I be a quiet agent of dialogue, and when should I resort to the megaphone of public diplomacy? When should I push the Security Council to do more, when should I allow myself to be pushed by it, and when should I be prepared to work outside it—including in an ad hoc grouping such as the Quartet? How should we deal with a democratic government such as Israel's, which, nevertheless, repeatedly violated international law by building settlements, or with militant movements such as Hamas, which resorted to and glorified acts of terrorism but had popular support due to the unsolved grievances of the people? How could we overcome the cynicism and despair fueled by the failure of the peace process itself and make sure that dialogue delivered on the ground?

Still, as secretary-general, I had to confront these dilemmas. The conflict must be solved, since the unresolved plight of the Palestinians and the continued insecurity of Israel are sources of profound moral concern and deep human suffering. There are broader reasons, too. I believe the failure to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace is a core source of frustration and instability in the region. This failure also remains for the UN a deep internal wound as old as the organization itself, given that the Arab-Israeli conflict began at the very inception of the UN—a painful and festering sore consequently felt in almost every intergovernmental organ and Secretariat body. As I told the Security Council before I left office in 2006, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not simply one unresolved problem among many. No other issue carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge affecting people far from the zone of conflict.

A UN S
EAT AT THE
P
EACE
T
ABLE
?

A secretary-general cannot simply turn up and expect to be granted the space to play a political role between the Israelis and the Palestinians. While many other actors wish to see a genuine multilateral approach, the United States is possessive of the file, and Israel does its best to keep others at bay. When I reflected on this early in my tenure, I realized that the secretary-general had been largely absent from every significant step of the modern peace process: the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979; the 1991 Madrid Conference; the 1993 Oslo breakthrough; and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty of 1994. During my first three years, I, along with many other world leaders, could only watch during 2000 as President Clinton hosted two summits—one in Geneva with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, and the famous Camp David talks with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Arafat—in failed attempts to clinch peace deals.

Yet the UN was heavily invested in the issues at stake. It was the UN, after all, that had first given legitimacy (through General Assembly resolution 181, in 1947) to the partition of mandate Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in 1948. The UN's first mediators had been deployed in the region—Count Folke Bernadotte, assassinated by Israeli extremists in Jerusalem; and Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Prize for negotiating the armistice agreements after the 1948 war. UN resolutions—particularly Security Council resolutions 242 and 338—were the agreed framework for dealing with the issues left unaddressed by the wars of both 1948 and 1967, on the basis of land for peace. UN peacekeepers were deployed in sensitive border areas, particularly between Israel and Syria and between Israel and Lebanon. UN aid agencies were doing important work on the ground—foremost among them the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, which cared for Palestinian refugees.

But the UN had been politically sidelined. When I observed the moribund debates in the General Assembly on “the Question of Palestine,” all the symptoms of irrelevance and even destructiveness were plain. They generated a lot of heat but did not shed much light on who had to do what, when, and how, to achieve peace. The General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights passed myriad resolutions against the Israelis. Any legitimate criticisms they leveled were often overshadowed by the fact that the member states of these bodies applied standards to Israel that they did not apply to the Palestinians, or to other conflicts—let alone to themselves. This left the Israelis convinced that they could never get a fair hearing from the United Nations.

But the Palestinians had even more grounds for complaint. They were the ones perpetually occupied or exiled. Their lands were being eaten up by settlements, they were seeing Jerusalem gradually isolated and altered, and they were largely unprotected when violence broke out. Yet the Security Council, with primary responsibility under the Charter for the maintenance of international peace and security, was usually silent. Even when the Council took positions, it did not establish mechanisms to enforce its will. The United States wielded its veto to protect the Israelis even from reasonable international scrutiny and pressure, paralyzing the Council on one of the world's central conflicts.

Neither extreme was healthy, but the split was clear: Israel did not trust the UN and kept the organization at arm's length, while the Palestinians looked to us to uphold their cause yet saw no prospect that we could help to achieve a solution.

I thought this was an untenable position for the UN on the verge of the twenty-first century, as bad for both parties as it was for the organization. Whatever the divisions among the UN membership, I resolved that as secretary-general, I should seek to be an active agent of peace. I realized this depended in large part on whether
all
the players in the region had confidence in me personally, regardless of their views of the organization itself.

R
EACHING
O
UT
, B
UILDING
T
RUST

With the Palestinians, this came fairly easily. I have strong feelings of sympathy and solidarity with their plight. As a young African, I believed they had been the victim of injustice, and I had identified with their liberation struggle. I had also felt firsthand the sense of loss, injustice, and indignity shared by Arabs, Muslims, and people of goodwill throughout the world over the Palestinian issue when I served as a young UN political officer in the Sinai.

I lamented and condemned the violent outrages some Palestinians committed, and I felt it was the duty of the UN, both on grounds of principle and as friends of the Palestinians, to speak plainly on this matter. But the “terrorist” epithet was too often used to deny the Palestinians' political identity and obscure the fact that an entire nation was either occupied or exiled. Every Palestinian in the region encounters in his or her daily life the restrictions and denials that arise from the unresolved conflict, summarized in one word: indignity. As I told the Security Council in my last address on the Middle East in December 2006, Israelis need to confront this fundamental Palestinian grievance: “The establishment of the State of Israel involved the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families, turning them into refugees, and was followed nineteen years later by a military occupation that brought hundreds of thousands more Palestinians under Israeli rule.” The American public and political system also need to understand that a reflexive and often unthinking support for almost any Israeli action or policy will in the long run serve no one.

But I could easily appreciate the compelling and legitimate narrative of Israelis. Burdened by a uniquely tragic history and alarmed by their perilous geography, Israelis felt themselves surrounded by hostility and only one military defeat away from annihilation. Some Israelis doubted that an agreement with the Palestinians would be achievable because “the maximum we can offer is less than the minimum the Palestinians can accept.” Others feared the loss of control that would come with accepting Palestinian sovereignty and were unsure that an agreement would bring the hostility toward them to a permanent end. Many Israelis saw the Jewish claim to
all
the land as stronger than the claim of the Palestinians to
part
of it—an argument I could never accept. But most Israelis were pragmatic enough to look for ways to accommodate the Palestinians and divide the land—
if
Israel's existence and security could be assured.

I had to grapple with the fact that Israelis felt that the UN perpetuated hostility toward them—and they were sometimes right. In my last address in the Security Council on the Middle East, I summed up what I had learned over decades of watching the handling of the issue in the UN's intergovernmental organs. Many may have felt satisfaction in the decades of endless passing of General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel's behavior, I said, but what tangible relief or benefit had this brought the Palestinians? What effect had these had on Israel's policies, other than to strengthen the belief in Israel that the UN is too one-sided to be allowed a significant role in the Middle East peace process?

This statement was the culmination of a decade of reaching out. During my first trip to Israel in 1998, I promised to do my best to usher in a new era of relations between Israel and the United Nations. Israel was the only member state excluded from membership of a regional group, so I called for normalization of Israel's status in the United Nations. I condemned anti-Semitism expressed by member states at the podium in New York and Geneva, and lamented the General Assembly resolution of 1975 equating Zionism with racism. None of my predecessors had said these things—after all, to do so is to criticize the membership itself.