Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

DEVELOPMENT: U.N. Officials Distance Themselves from Youth Summit

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 6 2004 (IPS) - While Secretary-General Kofi Annan tries to salvage the name of the United Nations in the wake of a scandal over the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, U.N. officials in other regions are teaming up to prevent what they view as possible damage to the world body’s reputation by non-U.N. actors.

The stance taken by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is typical of the United Nations’ caution toward groups that appear to have good intentions but which U.N. officials say fall short of their credibility test.

The man at the receiving end of UNEP’s scrutiny is no stranger to the global body – Bawa Jain, who catapulted onto the international stage in 2000. He did so after carving a name for himself as secretary-general of the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, which was held at the U.N. headquarters in New York.

Jain, an Indian-American, has been informed by the Nairobi-based U.N. environment agency that it is withdrawing all support for his plans to organise another international summit – the World Youth Peace Summit (WYPS) – at the U.N. premises in Kenya in October.

In a late February letter to Jain, UNEP chief Klaus Toepfer told him that the agency is no longer allowing this summit to be held at the U.N. regional headquarters in Africa.

UNEP officials also told IPS that Toepfer asked WYPS to remove all references to UNEP on its website and in any activities related to it. A UNEP endorsement letter dated May 5, 2003 no longer appears on the WYPS website.

Toepfer wrote to Jain saying, ”I must also withdraw our endorsement, and ask you not to use our name in relation to this event,” Eric Falt, director of the U.N. Information Centre in Nairobi, told IPS in an e-mail interview.

”We had not received any information about the funding, the number and selection process for the participants, and any other details about the organisation of the event,” Falt said.

Reached for comment by telephone this week, after IPS received no responses to its e-mail queries, Jain said: ”I just got back to New York. The e-mail with your questions is on my table. I will respond tonight.”

The e-mail reply that followed was not signed by Jain, or sent from his e-mail address, but signed ‘Secretariat of the World Youth Peace Summit’. ”The news about UNEP’s withdrawal of its support came as a big disappointment,” said the statement sent from an e-mail address bearing a ‘hds.harvard.edu’ domain name.

In its statement, WYPS says it cannot be faulted by UNEP for lack of transparency, since as any other non-governmental organisation (NGO), the WYPS ”is audited on a regular basis and its finances are public information”.

But Falt says: ”New information received by the United Nations in Nairobi suggested that Mr Jain’s reputation and previous activities were not necessarily in keeping with the standards required by our organisation.”

Signs that U.N. officials were uncomfortable with the private initiative led by Jain surfaced in late February, when the WYPS held a five-day Asia-Pacific meeting here – the first of several planned ahead of the world summit in Kenya.

By the second day of the meeting, held in the U.N. conference centre in the Thai capital, the management of the regional U.N. premises had gone to the extent of covering the usually-visible U.N. signs in its halls.

”If the U.N. symbols were not covered, it could easily be associated with the U.N., which was not the case,” David Lazarus, chief of the United Nations Information Service at the U.N. regional headquarters in Bangkok, told IPS. ”It had to be treated as a private dealing between the U.N. conference centre and WYPS.”

But even that had not eased the concern of some Asian governments that are members of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the U.N.’s Bangkok-based body in whose conference centre a part of the Asia-Pacific meeting of WYPS was held.

”Diplomats based here have been questioning why the U.N. premises were given out,” said a U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”They also wanted to know what standing WYPS had, since it is not a U.N.-approved NGO.”

These challenges, however, have not dampened the spirit of the WYPS organisers in pursuing their objectives – and holding a series of meetings for youth across the globe leading up to the summit in Kenya. The venues will include Bosnia, Brazil and Jordan in the coming months.

This summit ”will be an unprecedented event which will bring together two thousand of the most outstanding young leaders,” states the WYPS secretariat in its e-mail to IPS. The Asia-Pacific meeting of the WYPS process, which was attended by over 250 youth from over 40 countries, illustrated what Jain, a co-chairman of this civil society initiative, says is the whole aim of bringing young people together.

Besides interacting with religious and spiritual leaders, youth participants were encouraged to help build an agenda that reflects a wide spectrum of youth concerns to be endorsed at the Nairobi meeting.

Among the participants in the Bangkok meeting was Tushar Gandhi, great-grandson of India’s champion of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi.

The themes identified by the region’s youth for a better world covered the environment, education, governance, global cooperation and communication.

”Our goal is to support the U.N. through these efforts,” Jain said in an interview during the Asia-Pacific meeting, echoing a message he conveyed during the 2000 Millennium Peace Summit, a gathering of religious leaders that its organisers say seeks to ‘feed’ the U.N. process.

But even at the time, U.N. member states themselves rebuffed Jain’s effort to have a representative of the religious summit speak at the governmental U.N. Millennium Summit, which was held to establish a development agenda for the 21st century.

The 2000 Millennium Peace Summit was also overshadowed by the organisers’ failure to ensure the participation of one of the world’s most potent symbols of peace, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism.

Asked about the chances of the Dalai Lama’s participation at this year’s WYPS, Jain says that ”we have not approached him as yet”.

More certain to attend are representatives from one of Japan’s lay Buddhist sects, the Inner Trip Reiyukai International, which Jain said was a key financier of the WYPS Asia-Pacific meeting. Reiyukai officials sat at the rostrum during the Bangkok meeting.

Some Japanese Buddhists however are uncomfortable about the involvement of groups like Reiyukai. Teruo Matuyama, a Japanese Buddhist priest, told IPS that this is because the image of these religious groups is ”low in Japanese society. There is more respect for traditional religions such as Buddhism and Shintoism.”