Editorial»
Regional centre for peace and disarmament: Reality check
NOV 10 - For over a decade now, Nepalese delegations have been highlighting the need for the relocation for the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament for Asia and the Pacific during its annual address in the General Assembly.
Additionally, the Nepalese Mission has been religiously ensuring that a resolution to the physical relocation of the Centre from New York to Kathmandu gets passed in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly.
But the matter has remained where it was some 15 years ago. The other two regional centres are functioning from their respective regions Togo for Africa and Peru for Latin America and the Caribbean but as far as the Asia and the Pacific is concerned, it operates from New York where Director Tsutomu Ishiguri and his family stay.
A tricky situation for Nepal, almost a diplomatic mine field, since Director Ishiguri, whose wife is American and works in New York, is believed to be reluctant to leave the city. And the word in the UN headquarters here is that he is getting promotion, from his current P5 ranking to D, reportedly on the initiative of the Under Secretary General of Disarmament Affairs, Nobuyasu Abe, also a Japanese.
So why the inordinate delay in relocating the centre? No personal reasons are cited, of course. Ishiguri has denied that reason outright. The UN Secretariat has willy-nilly come to his rescue. It asked Nepal to provide diplomatic immunity to the locally hired staff, even the Nepalis. (We are told that the Office of the Legal Affairs of the UN has come up with the proposal). Another hurdle, Nepal has been told, is the worsening security.
The security conditionality appears to be an important one now but back in the early 90s when Nepal’s quest for relocation started in earnest, the security scenario was good. Even the UN General Assembly, no less, had mandated this in 1988.
But Nepal has tried to address this concern as well. It recently proposed Sunset provision on security for the regional centre. In other words, additional security which would lapse automatically as soon as condition returns to normalcy.
As for the conditionality of providing immunity to locally hired staff for the centre, Nepal has rightly rejected the proposal. It should have gone hammer and tongs about it, diplomatically of course, but has refrained from doing so. The situation provokes me to ask a question: Could the UN insist on this conditionality had it been, say, the United States or Britain or China, instead of Nepal? I doubt. This condition by the UN is hogwash and against international norms.
You may wonder how personal difficulty of one individual could come in the way of such an important issue. True, the question is genuine and needs an answer.
UN is an organization that runs on money given by member states. And Japan happens to be the second largest donor to the global body. This is not to say that the Japanese government is encouraging Ishiguri not to shift to Kathmandu. In fact, Nepalese officials take pains to stress that the Japanese government has nothing to do with relocation; if anything, they are supportive of Nepal’s
position.
To me, it all sounds being ultra diplomatic. Not unnatural since Japan happens to be one of the largest donors to Nepal too!
So, Nepal cannot ask for the transfer of the director. If you keep in mind that Japan’s quota of staff in the UN is not optimized, the situation looks so grave.
And to be fair to the United Nations, it cannot be seen to comply with a member state by transferring or removing its staff. Other nations might clamor for similar calls. However, what the UN has to keep in mind is that Nepal has waited for over a decade.
Due to this silent tussle over relocation, the center has not been able to discharge its primary duty in a region where there are three nuclear-armed states, two of them arch rivals which do not hesitate to mention N-bomb in their routine tit-for-tat statements.
Some seminars had earlier been organized on peace and disarmament (Nepal was not invited to a single one, despite being the host country) this year but no one mentioned why it was being held away from Kathmandu. These seminars come in handy when Director Ishiguri shows his progress in his annual report.
Is there a solution to this? Not under the current circumstances.
Unfortunately for Nepal, it all boils down to Ishiguri’s willingness who has wielded such clout for so many years. If Nepal can convince him (unlikely prospect if the past is any indication), then the center can function from where it is intended to. Or if Ishiguri is transferred to another post in the UN system that will allow him to stay in New York. Or wait until he retires and hope that the new director will have no qualms in operating from Kathmandu. This is the reality.Posted on: 2003-11-09 10:38
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