Buffalo Expatriate

I wanted to post these pictures I just took from the small balcony of my apartment. I am going to go ahead and say I’m pretty lucky to be living where I do in the city
This is Slava Park, which is directly across the street. It’s the place where soldiers occasionally gather to blast loud band music at unreasonable hours of your Saturday or Sunday morning. Also famous for its bride parades.

One of the most famous sites in Kyiv - the Pecherska Lavra

Another view of the Lavra, however this time you can see Rodina Mat, as well. Or as she is so fondly known to us: the Iron Maiden.

Burma (Myanmar) is in the news again for the suffering of its people, this time at the hands of a disastrous cyclone. On Saturday, Cyclone Nargis hit hard causing at least five states and the city of Rangoon to be declared disaster zones. At this point, the exact death toll is unknown, but just in the last day it has gone up from a little over 300 to now close to 10,000 and still counting. Whole villages have been wiped out and hundreds of thousands of people are without shelter, clean water, and basic supplies. Profiteering is taking its toll as the prices for goods are drastically increasing.

Aid organizations and foreign governments are scrambling to put together packages, as well as ship out stocks of supplies already prepared for natural disasters. The government of Burma has said they are willing to accept this aid, but it is hard to say what the future will bring for the affected populations, especially those completely cut off by destroyed infrastructure. In fact, these outlying areas are “still under negotiation” as to whether the UN and other aid organizations will be allowed to go there. The aid will also be difficult to watch from the outside as many major news organizations are still not allowed to report out of Burma.

Even in cases where countries have infrastructure, money, and the capability to respond to natural disasters, as Americans, we know what a lack of organization and political will can do to prevent assistance from reaching those most deeply affected by severe natural disasters. And if the death toll continues to rise in Burma, it will be the biggest natural disaster in Asia since the Tsunami of 2004.

Disasters of this magnitude take a great deal of time to recover from. For example, India, despite having a more modern infrastructure and more money than Burma, is still dealing with the remnants of the Tsunami in 2007, almost three years after the storm hit. This is especially the case for Indians among the poorest classes living in the affected areas. According to a report by the United Nations in December of 2007, the “recovery effort is still in full swing” as “Reconstruction has taken longer than originally anticipated” even though the national and local governments of the affected areas are credited with being helpful in the effort. Although the recovery seems to be almost complete, these populations, in the mean time, have been exposed to risks of human trafficking, setbacks in their education and livelihoods, among other issues. Not to mention this disaster affected mostly women and children. Seventy-five percent of the people killed by the tsunami were women and children.

Now, let’s take the situation and turn to Burma, where the disaster is at least equal, if not more devastating. India lost about 12,000 people, hundreds of thousands more were displaced, about 100,000 completely lost their homes. So far, Burma has lost about 10,000 with the number expected to grow as more accurate reports come in. The disaster zones encompass areas that are (were) home to about 24 million Burmese. And instead of the world’s biggest democracy working with foreign governments and aid organizations to organize the delivery of food, supplies, and basic needs, there is the military junta with a less-than-perfect record on human rights even in fair weather.

In fact, the Burmese government has decided to push ahead with Saturday’s vote on the Constitution despite the fact that almost half of Burma’s population are living in areas declared disaster zones. This is also despite the fact that some areas have reported not even so much as seeing the authorities come to their area to patrol and assist people. People have already expressed their frustrations with this blatant expression of indifference on the part of the government about the well being of its population:

Pictures on state TV show security services working to clear roads but in Rangoon and elsewhere there are complaints that the response to the disaster has been weak.

“Where are the soldiers and police? They were very quick and aggressive when there were protests in the streets last year,” a retired government worker complained to Reuters news agency.

Even if it seemed likely that this vote would have a positive effect on the freedoms and rights of the Burmese people (the general consensus seems to be that it will not), the fact that at least hundreds of thousands will not be able to participate already delegitimizes the results.

But as a depressing article from the BBC expresses:

Whatever they think of their leaders right now, the people of Burma desperately need their help.

Some photos and videos from the disaster:

Photo taken during the cyclone:

Video of storm footage from the AP:

Video of the aftermath from Al Jazeera (still allowed to report inside Burma):

Aftermath pictures from the BBC:

ReliefWeb has an appeal call from Church World Services, who is working with the Myanmar Council of Churches to get aid to people affected by the storm. They are looking to raise $50,000 and fast. The details of how you can contribute are on this page.

Well I am entering the sixth month of my Fulbright in Ukraine. Technically, I have four left to go, but I submitted an application for an extension of two months for my project so I may be here until the end of August.

The extension project will be related to migration, although not necessarily directly to human trafficking. My proposal is to conduct the necessary interviews and gather research on the rise of xenophobic violence and attitudes in Ukraine in order to produce a single, encompassing document that provides the reader with statistical data as well as the sociological research that has been following the rise of xenophobic attitudes, especially among the youth. I would be working with many of the organizations and actors in the Diversity Initiative, a coalition of the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Amnesty International, the Congress of Nationalities of Ukraine, Youth Human Rights Movement, the East European Development Institute, and the Security Liaison Officers in Embassies in Kyiv. The coalition now has 30 member organizations who are combining resources to identify the problem, come up with possible solutions, and present these findings and solutions to the government.

Their efforts have already yielded some results, including the creation of separate task forces in the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). In fact, just yesterday it was announced that the Ministry of the Interior is initiating creation of an inter-agency working group on fighting xenophobia and racism. Ironically, I couldn’t find the article in English, but for my Ukrainian-reading friends out there, here it is in Ukrainian. Basically, these government offices that have started work or are involved in combating xenophobia and racism will become part of this encompassing interagency group that is supposed to serve as a “mechanism.” Hopefully this will result in some hard steps such as actually prosecuting someone who commits these crimes under Article 161 of the criminal code, which provides for punishment for hate crimes. Despite the rising occurrence of racially-motivated crimes, not one person has been prosecuted under this law, and it is often swept under the rug as “hooliganism.”

That was a huge divergence, but essentially my project would be to combine the available studies and statistics with original research in order to produce a report that will make this information useful as it will be collected in one document. And I would have two months to do it. I should find out towards the middle or end of March whether or not I got it.

As far as my current research, it has been an exciting month. From February 13th to the 15th, the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking held the Vienna Forum at the Austria Center in Vienna, which I was fortunate enough to attend. I completed a seven-part series on the sessions I attended for The Human Trafficking Project- they will be posted over the course of the next week so if you’re curious about the information I was able to obtain while being at the Forum, it’s all there. Here are some pictures from the conference:

This was the last session I attended on Friday on gatehring statistical data about human trafficking, which is one of the biggest challenges of the field for many reason. I actually had to break the post on the session into two parts because there was so much interesting information from the panelists.

This was the reception on the first night of the conference at the Hofburg Palace, which was absolutely beautiful inside, as you can see. About 1,500 people attended this conference and came from many fields and regions.

Ok, one more picture from Vienna and this is mostly for fun. When I was at the airport while I was waiting to return to Kyiv. I was sitting with a colleague of mine of the OSCE in Kyiv, when she looked over and said,

“Elise, you follow Ukrainian politics, right?”
Me- “Yes, of course.” (a snarky comment about Ukrainian politics being the bane of my academic existence for the last two years may not have gone over too well here, so I held it back)
Tetyana- “Look over there”

And so I turned my head, and low and behold, Oleksandr Moroz was standing there with his assistant (well, at least I think she was his assistant). Now most of you probably have about zero interest in this guy, but Moroz was the once popular head of the Socialist Party here in Ukraine (different from the Communist Party). He provided some key support to Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution, but then after a fallout and a controversial deal with the Regions Party after the 2006 elections brought him to become Speaker of the Rada that year, he lost a lot of influence. In fact, his party did not make the 3% threshold in the last elections and so he is no longer in the Rada. But I marched right up to him and in my best teeny-bopper-meeting-Justin-Timberlake over-excited bumbling Ukrainian, I asked him for a picture, which he agreed to, probably relishing in feeling famous again. He actually flew coach too, which is either a testament to his socialist principles or to his dwindling bank account.

The following day was the competition for the Telders International Law Moot Court Team that I have been coaching since October. It was held at the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine, which is quite an impressive, modern building not far from my apartment. These students had been working extremely hard on their presentations, and they blew the other teams out of the water when it came to presenting their oral arguments. They were professional, polite, and as the head judge commented to me later, unshakable. Their score was enough to earn the team the prize for Best Oralist for Respondent, but, unfortunately, combined with their score on the written memorial, we fell into second place by just three points. We were really disappointed, but seeing as how this was my first time coaching and this was their first time competing, I think we did alright.

Map from the BBC

As of today, The Schengen Zone of the European Union has expanded to include nine additional EU countries including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Malta. Three of these countries border Ukraine. The Schengen Zone is the area of the EU that has eliminated internal border controls so once you’re in one country, you can essentially move freely to the next within the zone. The NYT/Reuters and BBC articles talk about the extension itself as well as the celebrations that took place including the symbolic joint removal of border equipment between old and new Schengen countries. A bit is mentioned about the EU’s neighbors who are neither in the European Union nor have any near prospects of joining like Ukraine, Moldova, etc. but hardly enough to get a good picture of how people are feeling.

It seems that although this move is generally good for the Schengen Zone, especially it’s new members, people on every side of the border (or lack there of) are feeling a little tense. As examples, Germans and Austrians seem to fear what might slip into the Schengen zone through its new members, Poland fears losing business from its close neighbors, and Ukrainians are concerned about their newest limitations in crossing into Europe, especially Poland.

Surprisingly, there were more articles in some of the main Ukrainian news sites about the latest moves of Tymoshenko’s goverment (yes, she did finally get elected Prime Minister) than there were about this expansion that affects pretty much the entirety of the western border of Ukraine. This article breaks down the new rules of Ukrainians traveling to Poland. Some Ukrainians will still be able to apply for visas to the new States free of charge, but ordinary Ukrainians will now have to pay 35 Euros for Schengen visas, at best. If the agreement between the EU and Ukraine on the new visa regime isn’t ratified by January 1, 2008, then the fee will be 60 Euros, I guess. And I’m not quite sure about these national visas Poland will continue to or has already issued.

MSNBC/The Financial Times had a great article on how it seems to be impacting both sides, although it seems the people they picked to quote were pretty random.

Just beyond the new red and blue border post in Vysne Nemecke marking the frontier between Slovakia and Ukraine, the Pannonian plain runs along the Carpathian Mountains, and one of Europe’s largest remaining old-growth forests.

As of Friday, those forests and mountains mark the European Union’s exterior boundary following the entry of Slovakia and eight other countries into the passport-free Schengen zone…

This heavily forested corner of Europe has long been a haven for smugglers and illegal migrants, seeking access to some of the world’s wealthiest economies. In past years it was relatively easy to walk through the forest from Ukraine. But, thanks to European Union funding, the 92km border now bristles with patrols, thermal sensors and more than 250 cameras…

North of Vysne Nemecke, on the other side of the forest, lies the Polish border city of Przemysl, where Poland’s imminent entry into the Schengen zone is viewed with trepidation by both Poles and Ukrainians who make a living by trading across the border. They fear the visas, which will be more expensive and harder to obtain for the Schengen area, will make it difficult for Ukranians to cross the border for work…

“There is no work at home, we have to come here to make any money,” says Ludmilla, a greying woman in her 50s selling a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka next to a display of cheap scarves and plastic Chinese toys. “The new rules are bad for you and bad for us.”

The article immediately took me back to last year when I traveled a few times from Chernivtsi to Przemysl to visit my relatives in Poland. The first time I went, we stopped in Lviv and about a half dozen of these “greying 50-something women” got in my wagon and immediately started unpacking and rewrapping cigarettes, sneakers, and bottles of vodka; some they put in bags and others they wrapped around their bodies with mailing tape. I was in absolute amazement, but these women were just chatting and taping each other, having a good old time. No one was stopped or questioned at the border. The second time I went, two of these women helped me carry my overstuffed luggage to the other side of the train station to catch my train to Milicz. Don’t ever underestimate them :-). I have a feeling these women will be traveling over the border much less now.

This border between Slovakia and Ukraine is also the subject of much debate among the refugee and migration community as thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers are now being spotted, sent back and detained in Ukraine at this border. Mark Mardell’s Euroblog has an excellent piece on the situation of the detained asylum-seekers near the border. Ukraine’s approach to these refugees has been considered somewhat less than positive by the IOs that monitor it.

A Transitions Online article I found on the situation of Schengen’s new neighbors was much more grim. The concerns were as follows:

The citizens of other countries will have to bear the full visa costs. For example, the hapless citizens of Belarus will have to pay about one-third of their average monthly salaries in order to visit neighboring Poland or Lithuania, doubtless to the delight of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, a tyrant who thrives on his people’s isolation.

I thought the authors suggestions under the section “A Better Neighborhood” were interesting. I assume he’s making reference to the Neighborhood Policy, which the EU operates with its immediate non-EU or non-applicant neighbors.

The EU should adopt and make public a set of common standards for visa applicants, as has been proposed by the European Commission. The new standards should ensure that visa procedures are not humiliating to applicants.

Seems reasonable, and much less confusing.

Research has shown that a number of EU consulates apply discriminatory criteria toward certain groups of applicants, such as young women, who in some consulates in Ukraine have visa-refusal rates in excess of 80 percent. Common standards should define clearly the situations in which a visa can be refused and provide for a right of appeal. The standards’ application, along with the implementation of the visa-facilitation agreements, should be monitored regularly by the Commission and by independent watchdog organizations.

This does make things a little tougher for me, particularly as I study human trafficking and am looking into how it is that traffickers are able to forge documents to get visas, etc. If the visa facilitation in turn facilitated things like trafficking, Schengen citizens, Ukrainian citizens, and basically the whole of humanity loses. Monitoring by watchdogs? I should hope so.

A big step toward visa facilitation could be achieved through consular cooperation among EU member states, whereby a country with consular departments on the ground could undertake to service applicants wishing to travel to any other Schengen member. One such initiative is already underway: the Hungarian consulate in Moldova will be empowered to issue visas for Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Estonia, and Slovenia.

A single EU visa-issuing center is also planned for Serbia, and this solution should be emulated elsewhere. It would make a vast difference, filling the gaps in national consular networks and setting high service standards.

Also makes sense, at least for Schengen member states. I’ll be interested to see how it works out in Serbia.

It is high time to put the question of lifting visa requirements on the agenda of the “enhanced” European Neighborhood Policy for Eastern Europe, which was launched by the German EU presidency in the first half of 2007. Roadmaps should be drawn in partnership with interested “neighbors” and the western Balkans, setting out clear conditions that the countries have to meet in order to have visas abolished.

There it is! The ENP, something I’ve kept my eye on ever since EuroSim 2005. I understand where the author is coming from, and I think the EU has done a little too much promising and not enough delivering, but I also understand this is an extremely difficult process and Ukraine has quite a few security problems compounded by corrupt practices in enforcement that it needs to nail down first before expecting the EU to open its visa regime. Nonetheless, the Schengen Zone is now at Ukraine’s border, making the EU closer and more closed off at the same time. I’m sure more reactions will be pouring in as Ukrainians actually experience the restrictions.

Should you feel compelled to voice your opinion in support of stronger EU-Ukrainian cooperation on the visa issue, Open Ukraine Foundation, International Renaissance Foundation, and the Centre for Peace, Conversion and Foreign Policy of Ukraine initiated an appeal online that you can sign, available in English and Ukrainian.

Four more days until I immediately run to Gabriel’s Gate for a house brew, a veggie souvlaki salad and a single order of barbeque wings. Not that I’m counting.

I am now, officially, a contributor to The Human Trafficking Project- a blog dedicated to creating and raising awareness on human trafficking issues. So any future posts I have related to my research will end up there leaving me free to post to whatever level of randomness I desire here.

My first post (other than my half-hearted introduction) is on the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. It was something we spent an entire morning on during the second day of the conference last week on assistance to trafficking victims. This is mostly because the CoE Convention provides considerable instruments for the protection of victims’ rights.

So, if you’re interested, it’s all there.

This has nothing to do with international politics, or being abroad, but I was going through my daily dose of headlines, and I came across this article on CNN highlighting the report “City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America,” which is published by CQ Press and saw Amherst right up there at number 4 of the safest cities in America. I don’t know if this is a drastic change from years past, but it was a first to me.

Rochester’s mayor was quoted in the article warning against such reports:

The mayor of 30th-ranked Rochester, New York — an ex-police chief himself — said the study’s authors should consider the harm that the report causes.

“What I take exception to is the use of these statistics and the damage they inflict on a number of these cities,” said Mayor Robert Duffy, chairman of the Criminal and Social Justice Committee for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Members of the FBI seem to agree:

“You’re not comparing apples and oranges; you’re comparing watermelons and grapes,” said Rob Casey, who heads the FBI section that puts out the Uniform Crime Report that provides the data for the Quitno report.

The FBI posted a statement on its Web site criticizing such use of its statistics.

“These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region,” the FBI said. “Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.”

The defense given by Doug Goldenberg-Hart, acquisitions editor at CQ Press, for the report was basically, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Unfortunately, you have to purchase the report in order to see it in detail. I wonder where Kyiv would rank on the list if it went international? 10,987,546,334,235,356,234,999th probably.

Leaving the central avtovokzal in Kyiv on Friday, I was kind of expecting this to be a typical sort of Eastern European backpacking experience with the normally cranky border patrol, rude hotel and restaurant staff, and people who couldn’t give a damn whether or not you needed help. Chisinau turned out to be one of the most affordable, friendly, and welcoming places I’ve ever traveled to. Not to mention it is cheap as hell, most importantly the fantastic champagne and home-made wine. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures right now. The only person with a working camera on the trip was my friend Ben (five of us studying in Ukraine went all together), and as soon as he sends me pictures, I’ll post them. Above is a generic one from the official site of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve traveled to some great, friendly cities in Eastern Europe, but I was not expecting much from Moldova. This is a small country of between three and four million people, and is considered the poorest country in Europe with a negative population growth estimate. Not to mention they are still dealing with the issue of the breakaway region of Transnistria, which separated from Moldova in a rather bloody battle in 1992 and is a hotbed of clandestine criminal activity due to various reasons. We actually took a bus that passed through Transnistria, and had to deal with the internationally unrecognized border security at about 3am. They, of course, dragged us off the bus once they saw we were foreign/Western, which actually worked out well as we got a bathroom break while they checked through our passports. Surprisingly, a young woman working at the crossing spoke English and politely explained to us that we needed to pay 3 hryvnia ($0.60)to pass. We understood the man before, but we were warned to be careful of using our Russian at the Transnistrian border. In the end, they let us go. Unfortunately, because it was still dark, we weren’t able to see much of the region, and we passed through it quite quickly.

The other disadvantage of crossing through Transnistria is that our passports don’t get stamped with a Moldovan entry stamp. In fact, the crossing from Transnistria into the rest of Moldova was just a guy standing between two temporary gates. He didn’t even check the passports of people who had fallen asleep. This however led to a couple of group members being stopped by Moldovan police in Chisinau who hassled them about not having an entry stamp in their passports, and eventually had to go down to the police station to sort it out. And by sort it out, I mean sit around and occassionally speak to an officer when he felt like it only to argue with him that the fact that they can’t get stamps crossing through Transnistria wasn’t their fault. Luckily between the two, they spoke Russian and Moldovan (Romanian) so eventually, they just let them go (Moldovan or Romanian is the official language of Moldova, but just about everyone speaks Russian and the issue seems less political than it is in Ukraine).

We stayed at the Hotel Zarea not too far from the center. It was only 130 lei each per night, which is ridiculously cheap for a decent hotel. Hostels in Krakow cost more. The women who worked at the desk were really nice. They almost had a heart attack when I walked out of the hotel without a jacket Sunday morning to hit up the market down the street for some juice. “I’m from Buffalo” doesn’t provide a Moldovan with the kind of reassurance that doing ridiculous things in freezing weather is natural to me than it would to an American.

Over Saturday, Sunday and Monday, we enjoyed Chisinau’s finest wine, quiche, champagne, shashlik, and beer. OK, well that’s a lie. Chisinau is kind of a cheap beer, but the rest was great. We ate just about everywhere we went, but we always started the night at the same shashlik restaurant with this kind of traditional decor and menu. I think we essentially depleted their supply of pork shashlik and domashne vino (homemade wine). On Monday, we went there right before catching the bus back to Kyiv, and a traditional Moldovan band came out and played.

Sunday night was actually quite lively in the bars and restaurants. Eventually we made it back to a place we had gone to the night before called Avtobus, where there’s a gutted marshrutka that’s used as a bar and they serve beer in these gumball machines with taps on them. Sunday, however, we managed to make friends with the people we were sharing a table with (often in Eastern Europe, as long as a seat is open at a table, even if there’s another party taking up the rest of the table, you can usually ask and sit with them). They turned out to be a group of students studying to be veterinarians in Chisinau. Absolutely hilarious group of guys. I suddenly felt a little more like I was in Buffalo when the next day, we ran into them on the streets and as we were talking, at least three other people stopped and said hello to all of us.

As we all sat down for drinks, one of them helped my friend Ben to get our return tickets, and another helped my friend Sam to find a decent internet place. The others sat with me and conversed over a beer before everyone came back and we all went to the dorm for a little birthday party where they proceeded to shower us with wine, sweets, and snacks. We even got to do some traditional Moldovan dancing, which despite their protests, is reminiscent of Turkish dancing (the Moldovan national hero is known for having fended off multiple Turkish invasions).

Even the taxi drivers are nice. Monday morning, when I finally had to actually do some business with a colleague of mine from the IOM Mission to Moldova, I took a taxi to where we were meeting, and the driver proceeded to tell me about the lack of patriotism in Moldova. He told me how much he liked living there and had actually lived abroad in Norway for a bit as a translator, but wants to stay in Moldova. He kind of demonized migration, but at the rate Moldova is losing people, I can understand why he’s upset.

Anyway, hopefully within the next cople of days, I can post the pictures from the trip. Chisinau now has a special place in my heart, and if you’re out this way, I would highly recommend stopping in for a visit.

Part of the three-fold approach to combating human trafficking, and one which I have taken particular interest in here in Ukraine, is the prosecution of traffickers. It has, thus far, been the weakest link in the response to trafficking. Which apparently, isn’t a problem unique to Ukraine.

A man jailed for eight years for trafficking two Brazilian women into the UK to make them work in a brothel has had his sentence cut by half. Hui Feng Zhu, 24, of Alderglen Road, Manchester, promised them restaurant work in the UK but then sold the pair to a brothel in Portsmouth, Hampshire.

The Chinese national was found guilty of four charges of human trafficking. On Thursday, the Court of Appeal reduced the sentence to four years and quashed the deportation order.

The women - aged 19 and 21 at the time - had met Zhu in Brazil, Portsmouth Crown Court was told during the trial in May. The jury heard how Zhu told them he had a restaurant in the UK and offered them work, saying they would earn six times more than they could in Brazil.

In May 2005, both women flew from Sao Paulo to London. Zhu met them and took away their passports and return air tickets. He told them there was no restaurant work available.

The court heard that the women were taken to the brothel in Malthouse Road, Portsmouth, where they were pressured to work as prostitutes. In fear of what might happen if she said no, the 21-year-old woman agreed to work there.

Her friend refused and was sent to live with Zhu.

About two weeks later, Hampshire police officers raided the brothel and found the woman. Zhu was given eight years for each offence, with the terms to run concurrently.

Now if this were in Ukraine, I would probably assume the trafficker got off so easily for various reasons: 1) the Judge didn’t take the case seriously 2) the Prosecutor didn’t take the case seriously 3) they actually charged it under a different law instead of Article 149, which could be of the consequence of either of the first two reasons or just a lack of knowledge on the said article. But the UK? Come on, mates. I haven’t been able to find the details yet on what happened, whether the evidence wasn’t properly handled or maybe he offered information valuable to the police. But that’s the optimistic side of me. The other side says, “Traffickers 1, International Response to Trafficking 0.”

This is all too appropriate as one of my recent posts elicited some comments about my naïveté regarding the United Nations. Today is the official United Nations Day, an international holiday meant to be an occassion for “Governments and peoples to reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter.” Now in its 62nd year as an organization, the UN System includes a vast network of it’s own and affiliated organizations. From this network, the UN is able to conduct humanitarian relief, peacekeeping operations, truth commissions, development programs, and other activities that help generally make life better for millions around the world. The UN is not without flaws and some criticism of the UN is justified, but this should be a rally for its reform not for its dissolution. Blanket statements like “the UN is useless” are tired and unjustified.

The UN serves a capacity that no one country could ever fulfill on its own, including the United States. It is the UN’s legitimacy that it has gained through the universality of membership that gives it this ability to provide an open forum for states to discuss, negotiate, debate, and settle common, bilateral, or even internal problems. Although this seems like a commonplace argument in support of the UN’s work, Shashi Tharoor’s article in Foreign Affairs points out concrete examples of why this is important, especially for the U.S.

In fact, part of the value of the UN (including for Washington) is the respect in which its members hold the body. Such respect has permitted the United States, on numerous occasions, to advance its specific interests under the cover of international law. For example, UN sanctions on Libya helped the United States achieve a settlement over the Lockerbie bombing. And after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Security Council’s two subsequent resolutions provided an international framework for the global battle against terrorism. Resolution 1373 required nations to interdict arms flows and financial transfers to suspected terrorist groups, report on terrorists’ movements, and update national legislation to fight them. Without the legal authority of a binding Security Council resolution, Washington would have been hard-pressed to obtain such cooperation “retail” from 191 individual states, and it would have taken decades to negotiate and ratify separate treaties and conventions imposing the same standards on all countries.

As such examples demonstrate, it is clearly not in the U.S. interest to discredit the UN or the Security Council. For every rare occasion when the council thwarts Washington, there are a dozen more when it acts in accordance with U.S. wishes and compels other countries to do the same. To marginalize the council, then, would be to blunt a vital arrow in the U.S. diplomatic quiver.

We can look at even more recent examples to U.S. interest, for example, in post-war Iraq. The UN is helping to shoulder the burden rebuilding the country, including humanitarian assistance to the 2.3 million Iraqis displaced within the country and the more than 2 million who have fled. Last month, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1770 extending and expanding the mandate of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq.

I’m not trying to defend the idea that the U.N. should only serve to one of its members’ interests, but rather to debate the notion that the U.N. is useless to the U.S. and that the U.S. is getting the short end of the stick by working within the framework of the organization. Another quote from the FA article that makes the relationship far more clear than I ever could:

Hammarskjцld once described the UN as an adventure — a Santa Maria battling its way through storms and uncharted oceans to a new world, only to find that the people on shore blamed the storms on the ship itself. Five decades later, Hammarskjцld’s metaphor still holds true: the UN continues to sail in turbulent waters and is still blamed for the squalls that assail it.

This brings to mind another metaphor: if international institutions serve principally as ropes that tie Gulliver down, then Gulliver will have every interest in snapping the ropes and breaking free of the constraints imposed on him. If, however, these institutions constitute a vessel sturdy enough for Gulliver to sail, and the Lilliputians cheerfully help him man the bridge and hoist the mainsail because they want to travel to the same destination, then Gulliver is unlikely to jump ship and try to swim on alone. So the world should similarly hold fast to its determination to live by shared values and common rules and to steer together the multilateral institutions that the enlightened leaders of the last century bequeathed to us. Only by doing so will our ship best the storm — with Gulliver still on board.

Even the UN itself recognizes the need for reform. It continues to grow as demand for its services has also grown, and with that growth comes pains. For all the work the UN is doing around the world, I’d like to wish you a happy United Nations Day.

I made it safely to Kyiv this afternoon on Northwest/KLM and I am staying in a daily rent apartment until I settle into a long-term flat, which will hopefully be tomorrow. Plenty of mundane stuff to take care of this week settling into the country. Starting next week, I’ll have some more exciting updates on how the Fulbright project is taking shape.

I had a strange mixture of feelings as I became more aware of the the fact I was in a foreign country. The man who met me at the airport, Nikolai (Neeck! He said excitedly), was absolutely fabulous. He didn’t seem very friendly at first, and he spoke all of two words in English, but once I engaged him a little in conversation, he just exploded with his tales of travels to Poland, Ukrainian politics, etc. In Ukrainian, of course. All I could do was sit back and take in as much as possible. I surprisingly felt pretty good about our conversation. He was just really excited I could answer simple questions and understand chunks of what he was saying (Thank you, Pani Tourtchina). We passed a group of official cars and police going in the opposite direction, who Nick believed was President Yushchenko on his way to the airport. I checked his schedule online and it said the President would be visiting Kharkiv today. I don’t know why you would take a plane from Kyiv to Kharkiv, but I suppose trains and/or cars are too inefficient for such business.

What was strange was that, I was excited to be doing something new in Ukraine, and at the same time, I felt like I had never left. For a moment, the last year and change disappeared and I was coming down the same highway stretch from the airport I always come down. It was like coming home to a place I didn’t grow up in nor had any childhood memories of. Strange, strange feelings.

Anyway, I hope everyone is well at home. Not to worry about me. I’ll figure things out with the help of my fantastic Ukrainian friends and the incredibly efficient Fulbright office here in Kyiv.

Nastrovya.