GRASS ROOTS PEACEMAKERS

•There is too much tangled overlapping of separately-operated humanitarian relief funds and machinery, which could be consolidated into an efficient Operations Branch of the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, organized to best help the front-line volunteers of all the NGOs;

•One report states that all official “aid” from the North to the South amounts to about $56 billion a year. The trade, monetary, and financial policies of the same donor governments are currently depriving developing countries of over $500 billion in income that they could be earning each year if restrictive trade practices against the less developed world were stopped; 3

•To lay solid foundations of trust the General Assembly and the Security Council should adopt clear criteria and rules of engagement for interventions by the UN with or without the request of a state. The efficiency of the UN command systems should be improved to the point where no major power will have an excuse for refusing to place its forces under a field commander approved by the UN, while expecting all other countries to do so;

•It is unconscionable for governments that were responsible for, or complicit in, the total destabilization of countries like Angola and Mozambique, to expect the UN to try to cope with the chaos with little or no special assistance;

•The major industrial powers have refused to create an equitable International Trade Organization. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) focuses only on the poorest countries, imposing conditions that have contributed to one upheaval after another. Too often, the “global economy” is in reality the economy of North America, Europe, and Japan. The costs of putting band-aids on the mass abject poverty in less developed areas are staggering, and will increase exponentially unless addressed. The more developed areas will have peace only when the needy of the less developed areas have the purchasing power to achieve an equitable standard of living. An urgent, new Marshall Plan alliance of wealthy nations for massive aid to the poorest nations may be the only sensible way to give the poor nations a civilized standard of living, and to prevent uncontrollable masses of the poorest nations overwhelming the ability of the affluent nations to absorb them without disasters to both emigrants and receiving nations.

The criticisms that the UN has not been able to eliminate the scourge of warfare, and that there is still a worldwide denial of justice, human dignity, and universal human welfare and rights for all people, are not valid. The UN is in reality a deputy of the nation states, and has achieved an amazing degree of success despite the failure of the nation states and the general public to give the UN the direction and the support required to carry out its duties. The leaders of modern society are faced with finding a new approach to building world peace. The fatal flaws of war and inhumanity of the last one hundred years have degraded our humanity, and it may well require another hundred years for civilization and humanity to work its way out of the abyss of mankind’s inhumanity toward one another which is manifest in today’s society. The reform and renaissance of the ethical spirit for peace must start with “we, the people,” the world nation states, and the UN. To meet the dreams of the founders of the UN is the most urgent and demanding task facing mankind today. The continuing evolution of the progress since the end of the Second World War toward the unity of mankind and our co-dependence on one another as citizens of “one world,” the “global village,” has made the work of the UN the main cohesive entity to serve all nations and all mankind. The UN is now indispensable as the only organization unifying the political and social future of mankind. Without the UN there is no prospect of peace, goodwill, and the continuation of raising and sharing the standard of living of all mankind.