Civil Society, Development & Aid, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Global Governance, Globalisation, Headlines

DEVELOPMENT: NGOs Talk, Governments Listen

Sanjay Suri

HELSINKI, Sep 6 2005 (IPS) - Several governments are preparing to take international policy decisions on the back of a conference of non-governmental organisations beginning here in Finland’s capital Wednesday.

More than 600 participants from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in 70 countries are gathering for the three-day Helsinki Conference 2005, entitled “Mobilising Political Will”, to take part in talks with an eye to achieving a more inclusive and equitable globalisation.

But officials from several countries will also be on hand for immediate follow-up of NGO recommendations related to the Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy, which aims to bridge the gap between the developing South and the industrialised North through inclusive “action-oriented” dialogue.

“Besides the Helsinki conference itself with the NGO and civil society participation, we have also brought together friends of the Helsinki process governments,” Finland’s minister for foreign affairs, Erkki Tuomioja, told IPS. These include representatives of the governments of Britain, Spain, Hungary, Malaysia, Thailand, India, South Africa, Tanzania, Algeria, Egypt, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.

“The Helsinki conference itself is, to be quite frank, a talking shop,” Tuomioja said. “But we expect to closely follow the discussions that will be held, and pick up on any concrete and useful ideas, and follow up on them.”

Extensive discussions have evidently been held already between leading NGOs and government representatives on a ten-point draft plan NGOs expect to agree, and governments are resolved to act upon.

“We have already prepared on a senior official level some of the items on which we will be working together, based on proposals from the Helsinki group report, and we hope to come up with a joint statement on Friday on how we intend to work on these issues,” Tuomioja said.

An example, he said, is the proposal for an arms trade treaty on small arms and light weapons, “which are really the weapons of mass destruction in terms of the number of people killed every year.”

The trade in arms is very unregulated, the Finnish minister said, “and we want to work for a treaty which would make arms transfers fully transparent, also with the idea of limiting them and having more strictly enforced criteria relating to human rights abuses in relation to the way arms trade is conducted.”

Governments and NGOs have been working together on this issue already. “The EU (European Union) had a discussion on this at the last meeting, the British are very keen on moving forward on this, and we have also hosted a series of seminars,” Tuomioja said..

But what leads Finland, a country of no more than 5.2 million, to take the lead in such initiatives?

The Helsinki Process launched by Finland earlier in relation to rights with Russia, or the former Soviet Union, goes back many years, and the Helsinki conference now arises as a continuation of that process.

Finland, which shares a 1,300-km border with Russia, remains concerned over recent suppression of rights there.

“Some recent developments are not positive, and we are concerned, but compared to 20 years back it is a different situation,” Tuomioja told media representatives earlier. “There will be no return to that kind of Russia. We do not think of Russia as a military threat. But insecurity is always a threat in any case.”

Finland is looking to address issues of insecurity far beyond Russia. “We have to be active in peacekeeping operations in distant conflicts,” Tuomioja said. Finland has sent large numbers of troops for peacekeeping operations around the world, and has been engaged actively in peace initiatives in countries as far from its borders as Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Under its presidency of the EU next year, Finland is hosting an Asia conference that will be the biggest international event Finland has ever had.

“Our moves are driven by self-interest,” Tuomioja said. “You cannot divide security in today’s world. Obviously historically where we are on the Baltic, relations with Russia and Germany are important to us. But they are not really the kind of military threats that they were.”

Finland too, he said, must address the kind of threats that arose from Afghanistan. “Unresolved conflicts in Afghanistan or anywhere in the world may in today’s world very quickly develop into global challenges,” he said.

The world neglected Afghanistan for 20 years, he added. The armed groups there were “funded and armed from the outside, but nobody really took any interest before Sep. 11, though it was apparent that Afghanistan had become a base for global terrorism.”

Beyond terrorism the new threats to security “are increasingly of a non-military kind,” Tuomioja said. “We have new kinds of security threats such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) or communicable diseases. We have of course climate change. We have seen what happened in the Caribbean and the United States, which has been an eye-opener, we also hope, for the Americans.”

Finland must address such issues, Tuomioja said. “And if we have to enhance security for our people, we have to do it in a global, multilateral framework.”