United front: Adrian Glamorgan on the enduring value of the Quaker United Nations Office

‘Clear minds, kind hearts, and devoted effort.’

The work of the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO), both in Geneva and New York, can seem a long way away. Yet its diligent efforts for peace, social justice and the environment affect us all. It has been doing this work for a considerable period of time, now: 2023 sees QUNO celebrate seventy-five years of direct engagement with the United Nations.

I recently had a rare opportunity to visit Geneva and meet with staff and volunteers. It helped me better appreciate why the work of QUNO has been so successful – and where it may be heading in the future.

A few things became clear, very quickly. QUNO is a very small community organisation and cannot do everything: limited resources need to be employed judiciously. Friends must discern together: from Geneva’s recently-appointed director Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, to QUNO’s three programme representatives and assistants, to a programme officer, and two administrative staff, all supported by a Quaker United Nations Committee representing Friends all over the world.

The QUNO office must map diplomatic gaps, and quiet opportunities, and seek solutions that diplomats and their countries may not ordinarily dare to believe possible. Interests may converge. But QUNO’s main task is not just about amending resolution clauses, it’s about helping the world community reassess its values.

Transformation needs a process. Quaker House in Geneva, an old-world cottage not far from more than a dozen international agencies and the UN Human Rights Council, is the homespun venue where diplomats are invited for quiet discussions and wholesome food. This is a time to breathe, off the record. While I was there, a refugee community leader turned to Laurel Townhead, QUNO’s representative for human rights and refugees, and warmly affirmed Friends’ methods, relishing the meal and the opportunity. ‘If you sit down and you eat together, if you share bread and you share salt, then you’ve reached a different level of communication and contact and understanding.’ The gathering of diplomats with refugee-led NGOs seemed to be a success. Laurel explained to me that, although she would have liked to have continued to be part of the conversations she’d facilitated, ‘We weren’t needed again because, after we’d facilitated one conversation, it was possible for those invited to take that forward on their own… they’d created that space, eaten together, and they could take that forward without us needing to be involved.’ QUNO’s long-term commitment to its work does not need to hold on to any one of its successes, when so much else still needs to be done.

QUNO does not campaign – not in the way I’ve understood campaigning in civil society. Yes, there will be many Friends outside climate conferences bearing witness, joining protests and undertaking nonviolent disobedience, but QUNO itself dovetails with these efforts, serving as a bridge between those thousands of citizens kept behind the barriers, and diplomats making their decisions. This happens more often than you might expect, with QUNO sometimes able to contribute to the process by suggesting steps forward.

Then there are Friends’ testimonies. Lindsey Fielder Cook, QUNO’s representative for climate change, told me about one important meeting in March 2023. It involved the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which creates reports on climate science. Once a report is adopted by nation states, it creates an accountability among the international community and within countries. Accordingly it is very influential. ‘In the approval session (which is about seven days, [working] nonstop, sentence by sentence), at about two in the morning there was a complete divide in this plenary. The developing states wanted recognition that the US$100 billion promise was still not met, while the developed ones wanted to focus on fossil fuel expenditure.’ Lindsey’s intervention reflected Friends’ approach. It was late in the night, she told the meeting, but, on an ethical basis, sentences covering both concerns were correct. ‘Why don’t we include both sentences?’, she asked. ‘Both have an ethical and scientific reason to be here, both are important and both are interconnected. Both need to be named to recognise responsibility. Both are important statements for us as communicators to relay… let us have both.’

There was silence in the room, and then both statements were accepted. The aim is ‘to move us beyond the politicisation and see the human face in it,’ says Lindsey

On that occasion, QUNO brought silence to proceedings, settling delegates. Silence is something Friends know well, for its granting of insight, unhurried wisdom, and collective peace. I had thought much about QUNO’s track record in helping bring about important conventions (like the Chemical Weapons Treaty, and the Arms Trade Treaty), but there is an extra dimension Quakers can offer. For Lindsey, QUNO’s discernment becomes focused if ‘there is something that we can contribute, based on what we would morally and ethically wish to offer’. A few Friends spoke to me about this moral or ethical dimension to QUNO’s work. It isn’t just about getting peace and justice included in the Sustainable Development Goals, or climate justice being recognised in climate talks.

Suzane Gunn worships in Geneva. She supports the work done at Quaker House, with decades of care and concern over Friends’ international work. Suzane spoke humbly about the spiritual element: ‘If you’re having to meet with belligerents, people who are doing human rights abuses, you can’t put on false faces. You can’t manipulate either. That takes inner strength. You don’t necessarily have to be a Quaker, you have to be a spiritually centred person. You are exemplifying a particular way of looking at the problem that’s value based.’

As I listen to the staff it strikes me that the long hours, intense concentration, travelling, research, report-writing, meetings and managing of conflict in the auditorium will take their toll. For that reason, Suzane believes that the pressure needs to be better understood more widely, and that a Quaker Meeting needs to stand behind each of the QUNO staff – in practical ways, relevant to individual needs, like offering a meal. But she is also clear on Friends’ more general responsibility, namely ‘providing sufficient funding so representatives don’t have to spend precious time, when they should be negotiating, beating the bushes to find fundraising… You can’t do the important work unless you have a sense of knowing you can carry it through. You can’t engage two disputing parties and say “Oops, we’ve run out of money we have to drop the meetings”.’

When I asked each of the staff to describe a typical month at QUNO, Florence Foster, the representative for peace and disarmament, summarised everyone’s near-identical response. ‘I don’t think there’s such a thing at QUNO! The average month normally has a key conference in it somewhere, and so there’s a lot of preparing for that, depending on whether we’re actually going to engage actively, by taking the floor, making statements, or whether we’ll be influencing from the sidelines. So there might be a lot of one-to-one meetings with delegates around a coffee or lunch to make sure that our messages are being passed through, and hopefully owned by a state that might be taking the floor. It might be that we have side events – public events where we are organising a panel session with different stakeholders. And it might be that we’re then doing quite a lot of preparation towards that. There’s a lot of internal reporting that has to happen, either to donors or to our own Yearly Meetings.’

Flo has many skills, mentioning in passing that she is trained in mediation. At the right moment, she has also been known to produce cakes in the kitchen! The other representatives have diverse life experiences, qualifications, and life responsibilities; and yet they seem to have in common the best Friends could hope for: clear minds, kind hearts, and devoted effort.

QUNO Geneva’s newest programme, ‘Sustainable and Just Economic Systems’, is led by programme officer Andrés Naranjo. He is passionate about Friends helping to transform the rules that have created so much global poverty, and misdirected human values. He acknowledges the current form of globalisation fosters economic interdependence, possibly serving as a mechanism of peace, making war too costly between nations. But the current system ‘also has its drawbacks, and one of the major drawbacks of trade and trade policy is the lack of inclusivity of people that are affected and impacted by trade, for example, indigenous peoples, women and children. Trade needs to take into account the historical injustices between and within member states of the World Trade Organization.’

The World Trade Organization is a relatively new organisation, and QUNO is adapting to its presence as an opportunity for transformation. QUNO’s director in Geneva, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, is keen on Friends engaging with it. In immediate terms, bringing about a treaty ending plastics pollution would be historic. But the question of healing past and continuing injustices is also close to her heart (and will be a key theme in the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) World Plenary next year). QUNO is not just about resolution clauses, it is about the values and processes Friends have been proclaiming since 1652.

Quakers have always grasped that policy matters. Famines don’t just happen; refugees do not suddenly appear on shores; fossil-fuel companies have not just started to pretend that carbon emissions don’t matter; wars do not just break out for no reason; plastics haven’t suddenly filled the oceans. These are not natural events, but the consequences of policies, or the absence of policies. QUNO is doing what it can, when the opportunities arise. It is there with the details, but with a wider vision, too.

If the spiritual dimension needs to be intrinsic to QUNO staff, then the Geneva director’s time growing up in apartheid South Africa has much to teach us. A pacifist and longtime Friend, Nozizwe joined the African National Congress in 1979 when it was decidedly illegal to do so. As the South African government grew more extreme, Nozizwe experienced arbitrary detention without trial, which turned into a year in solitary confinement. People dear to her were killed. I am in awe of how such experiences can temper and strengthen the precept of loving ‘that of God’ in everyone. Nozizwe was elected to parliament, serving as deputy defence minister and deputy health minister. There, she upheld the interests of the twelve per cent of the population infected by HIV, while trying to deal with a minister who thought more garlic, not antiretroviral drugs, was the answer.

When much younger, Nozizwe came to Geneva to speak at the UN, a formative experience. Now she is back, with a passion for justice, and for past and continuing wrongs to be recognised and redressed. Her relationship with diplomats assists QUNO’s active presence.

My invitation to Friends is to rethink QUNO. Yes, it is a place where much good international work is done. That work is exhausting, and needs our help – campaigning in our own part of the world, offering support, and finding new ways for our Meetings to fund the offices in Geneva and New York. Devotion needs practical funds to continue.

The level of work is beyond what we might dare ask any of our Friends, and yet for decades QUNO staff have been offering this service, creating a steady Quaker presence, developing trust, and finding openings. Their work builds on what Friends have discerned, and what can be afforded. Yes it can seem a long way away, but those treaties forged in New York and Geneva matter in many corners of the world, including yours and mine. QUNO staff seek to make every corner of the world a better place. They need our prayerful help, as we need theirs.

Adrian is the Asia West Pacific secretary for FWCC.

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