Hello! Welcome to DAYMUNC XI and the Security Council. My name is Heather Wiehe and I am very pleased to serve as your Director. This is my fifth year of involvement with the Conference, my second as a Director and my fourth on the dais. In addition, I have served as the Assistant Director of the United Nations’ Population Fund (UNFPA) at the National Model United Nations Conference. I currently work as an International Trade Analyst with the United States Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. and will graduate with my Master’s in International Relations in March of 2004. I hope to eventually pursue my PhD in conflict resolution. 

The topics for the 2004 Security Council are as follows:

I. Sanctions and Enforcement 

II. Nuclear Materials Security 

III. Peace Making and Nation Building 

Since the Security Council has the ability to set its own agenda, please do not think that you are required to discuss these topics. They are simply a place to begin your research and to determine your country’s individual policy. The committee will have two hours the first morning to set an agenda based on your priorities. After that, we will revert to my set topics in order to expedite the conference. 

Please familiarize yourself completely with the rules of the Security Council. They differ slightly from the normal rules that other committees utilize. For instance, there are 15 members and it requires a vote of 9 in favor to pass a substantive motion as long as the permanent five members, the People’s Republic of China, the United States of America, the Russian Federation, France and the United Kingdom, refrain from veto. A veto by a permanent member prevents adoption of a proposal, even if it has received the required number of affirmative votes. Abstention is not considered a veto. As a P-5, it is very important that you review and understand the occasions and circumstances that force your country to utilize its veto power. 

I look forward to meeting everyone and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. It is part of my job to answer any questions and help you with any research or policy issues that arise during your preparation. 

Sincerely,

Heather Wiehe, Director (heather_wiehe@yahoo.com ) Phone: 301-574-2666 or Cell: 240-353-9265 

Chair: Renee Nighbert

Rapporteur: Matt Horton

Introductory Remarks

“Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.”
--Kofi Annan, Secretary General United Nations 

History

The United Nations Security Council is the most powerful body of the United Nations because it is not limited by giving only recommendations, but may take immediate and decisive action. (1) Its job is to “maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace." (2) 

The first meeting of the United Nations Security was held on January 17, 1946 and there are 15 actual members. The P-5, consisting of the United States, the United Kingdom, the People’s Republic of China, France and the Russian Federation, have veto power over all substantive matters brought before the committee. The other members, elected on a two-year rotational basis, are Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Germany, Guinea, Mexico, Pakistan, Spain and Syria. 

I. Sanctions and Enforcement

 According to Chapter VII, Article 41 of the United Nations Charter, the Security Council is permitted to “decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations." (3) 

The SC has enacted this article in the form of sanctions 14 times recently against Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (also Kosovo), Afghanistan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. (4) Sanctions by the SC can take many forms, from complete economic and trade isolation to embargoes on specific items like arms and even bleach. Banning all travel to a particular country is also an often-used sanction because it denies tourist dollars that are pivotal to most economic growth. 

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have voiced concern that sanctions only have a negative impact on those segments of society that are the most vulnerable such as children and those afflicted by poverty. The leaders and those in actual power still reap the benefits by skimming off the top of international aid or blocking it all together. 

For instance, in North Korea, controlled food shipments constructed around tough sanctions were regularly diverted to the soldiers of the regime, leaving the regular population to continue starving. The absence in that particular country of a monitoring body such as the United Nations or an NGO made it particularly difficult to determine the extent of this problem. Who should be responsible for getting food shipments to those in dire need when the UN and NGOs are denied access to the country? Should sanctions then be lifted if people are obviously starving? Should the world sacrifice morality for international security? Is it possible to have both? 

Another argument against sanctions is that they can be detrimental to very fragile economies like those in the Third World. These economies can take very little fiscal pressure because they are already tottering on the brink of destruction. Sanctions by their very nature are used to limit a specific sector of the economy. When they are applied in the case of economies that only have one or two serious exports, it sends that economy into a serious dive, not only denying the people important requirements for survival, but also denying the other countries that have financially supported these economies their financial due. 

In order to solve these problems, the Secretary General Kofi Annan advocates the use of “smart sanctions.” These are sanctions that are targeted at the entity or political elite who created the need for the sanctions in the first place. These sanctions include the freezing of financial assets and the blocking of financial transactions of the elites. In Angola, the United Nations placed mandatory travel sanctions on officials of UNITA and their immediate family members. In terms of more targeted sanctions such as prohibition of travel, how would the United Nations ensure compliance? What type of manpower would be required to enact these types of sanctions? Who would provide the funding for the monitoring bodies? 

A prime example of smart sanctions is the application of sanctions on “conflict diamonds” that come from the African continent. These diamonds, also popularly known as blood diamonds, are traded on the international market for arms and funding for ethnic and civil conflict. Rebel groups use terror and violence to force local people to mine these diamonds that are then sent into the international market. 

In an attempt to circumvent illicit diamond trading, the world community has created a ‘Certification of Origin’ system. This system is only able to prevent the trading of conflict diamonds on the legitimate international market; trade on the black market is still prevalent. Once diamonds reach the international level, however, their origin is at best difficult to trace. On December 1, 2000, the General Assembly (GA) passed A/RES/55/56 that made the actual connection between trading African blood diamonds and the continuation of rebelliousness against international peace efforts on the continent. 

The international community has debated, since the conception of sanctions, their effectiveness. It seems that if they are to be effective against the agitators of the problem, the world community needs to create a more cohesive system of application. An example of this division is the case of Cuba. The United States continues to enact travel bans for its citizens to the Cuban island while almost all other countries repealed that ban quite some time ago. Cuba has a thriving economy built from tourism from other countries. How effective is this type of sanction? Is the principle enough to continue or does it become irrelevant once the sanction is proven ineffective? 

In April of 2000, the Security Council created a working group called the Working Group on General Issues on Sanctions (5) that is tasked until the end of 2003 with determining ways to increase the effectiveness of sanctions. One of the primary questions is how long should sanctions be utilized before deemed ineffective enough to resort to force. This is a question that will be discussed permanently regarding sanctions because each country has their own agenda and opinion regarding actual effectiveness; such is the case of sanctions on Iraq. The United States refused for many years to lift sanctions on the Iraqi government causing a backlash by NGOs regarding the starvation and increase of illness among Iraqi children. The United States wanted to avoid allowing Saddam access to items that would reconstitute his weapons program. The problem was that some of those items had very practical daily uses such as bleach. 

Sanctions will be debated forever as a means to control countries before the disagreement escalates to armed conflict. The problem is determining effectiveness while drawing the line between wasting time and harming innocent civilians who are merely victims of their regime’s actions. 

II. Nuclear Materials Security

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought the world a new type of security threat, the proliferation of unsecured nuclear materials. According to United States government studies (6), there is enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium in Russia to make approximately 40,000 nuclear weapons. This number obviously does not include the unprotected stockpiles in Iraq and North Korea’s money for nuclear weapons strategy that are fast becoming serious problems for the international community. 

Since 1993, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (7) has tracked 411 cases of trafficking in nuclear materials. Three men were arrested in Paris with 5 grams of highly enriched uranium transported in a lead cylinder and customs officers came across uranium hidden in the trunk of a car on the Bulgarian-Romanian border. A scientist at a renowned research institute in Russia was arrested for stealing small amounts of weapons grade uranium over long periods of time. He was only captured when swept up in a ring of thefts totally unrelated to the uranium. (8)

Approximately 1.5 kilograms of 90-percent weapons grade uranium were stolen from the Luch Production Association located in Russia in 1992. Another 3 kilograms were stolen from a weapons facility in Moscow in 1996 and an amount “quite sufficient” to produce an atomic bomb was stolen from a facility in the Ural Mountains. (9) These materials have never been located. 

The examples above demonstrate that these people were either captured based primarily on luck or not at all. The level of nuclear material trading that goes on undetected may be too large to even imagine. Even though the IAEA has made significant steps toward helping countries secure their nuclear stockpiles, lack of security, poor inventory records and excessive plutonium production are still prevalent problems. (10) 

Making plutonium and uranium weapons grade is an expensive process, but with the financial funding of many of the terrorist groups and rogue nations in existence, the mere possibility is all that is needed to create better mechanism of enforcement regarding security of nuclear materials. It is an understood fact that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have actively tried to obtain fissile material in order to manufacture a crude nuclear or radiological device. Al-Qaeda clearly has the financial means to create weapons grade material if able to obtain the proper tools. 

The current occupation of Iraq is providing new problems in stockpile control. With the inadequate number of soldiers located in Iraq and the international community’s unwillingness to provide support forces, there is not enough manpower to protect or even identify all weapons manufacturing and storage facilities. While weapons of mass destruction have not been located, it is possible that pieces and particles of this program may exist. Without proper identification of all weapons facilities, it is impossible to know the extent and whether these pieces and particles are available to terrorist organizations. 

North Korea presents a whole new set of issues for proliferation. Pyongyang’s nuclear program has been a source of contention for the international community for some time. Their increasing political isolation and aversion to IAEA inspections have not bided well for negotiation. North Korea’s withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) (11) was completely within the parameters set forth by the document. The action taken by the international community was first to ignore and hope that continued isolation would force a collapse of the regime. Since this has not happened, the world community has finally attempted to re-engage, but it may already be too late. Since the international agenda is completely occupied with one rogue power, Iraq, is it possible that North Korea has or could completely slip through the cracks? 

After the international community attempted negotiations with North Korea, they threatened to sell their nuclear technology to the highest bidder. What controls should the international community initiate to prevent rogue nations from selling their nuclear technology to the highest bidder? Is prevention of this even possible? If diplomacy completely fails, should the international community take pre-emptive action or does that violate international law? What makes North Korea different from Iraq? 

Conflict has taken a completely new turn than the wars of the past. It is more guerilla warfare than expansive military action. What will the acquiring of nuclear material by terrorists or rogue nations mean to countries that still operate from a controlled military perspective? How will countries keep their citizen’s safe? 

III. Peacemaking and Nation-building

Peacemaking and nation building, once two ideas not thought to be necessarily connected, are now considered completely interconnected. Long-term peace and security does not come from continued conflict and force from the peacekeepers, but from an integrated approach to strengthening the economy and political institutions. ”Solutions to peace must be devised in a context that takes into account the following: the high cost of conflict and the economics of peace, the importance of peace to development, the role of civil society in promoting peace, why women should be involved in the peace process, and the challenges for the future." (12)

Peacemaking is defined exactly as it sounds. It is the making of peace between two or more entities that disagree. Nation building, however, has a more formalized definition. It “is a process that takes place in the aftermath of a conflict. It is an action to strengthen and solidify a political settlement such as economic reconstruction and a reestablishment of normal civilian life. The main purpose is to build the tools necessary to avoid a return to conflict." (13) While this is the most accepted definition of nation building, the question that begs to be asked is why does nation building take place after a conflict and reasonable measures are not taken during? 

This concept of nation building has many positive and negative attributes. With the interconnectedness of economies and the inability of state boundaries to contain populations, all countries are affected by peace and war. The repatriating of refugees, developing plans for effective disarmament of ex-combatants and maintaining of order and security are primary to the safety and security of all the nations of the world not just those on the border of the conflict. 

Afghanistan and Iraq provide the most obvious current examples of whether peacemaking is the only responsibility of the international community, or whether we should remain and create a long lasting and stable country. In Afghanistan, in particular, the Communist regime in power was almost ready to topple in the 1970s. The United States funneled money into rebel uprisings and the USSR came to provide support to the crumbling government, causing a Cold War conflict by proxy. The provision of financial resources to rebel groups suggests that the two pole powers had responsibility in the demolition of the Afghani standard of life. Is this the responsibility of the two poles, or does that remain totally an Afghani problem to fix? 

The Taliban regime came directly from the power vacuum left after the U.S.-Russian conflict in that region. Once that particular conflict was over, both powerful nations took their financial backing of various segments of the country and returned home, leaving Afghanistan to figure out how to salvage the economy left over from their Communist regime. The Afghani population was desperately hungry for leadership and the Taliban stepped forward to assume that position. Was it the US or Russia’s responsibility to stay and provide stability to the region? If they had, how would the world community be structured now? Would Afghanistan be a concentration of terrorist activity? 

Iraq, however, represents a different scenario. The United States and their coalition sought to undermine a government that was solid and robust. Regardless of the socio-humanitarian issues related to Iraq, Saddam Hussein held power for more than 40 years. He was not going anywhere in the near future. This was markedly different from the Afghani situation where the government was almost ready to topple. The coalition have destroyed and are attempting to rebuild what was already an existing infrastructure that while not perfect, was not in the same poor shape as Afghanistan. Primarily in the past, Iraq acted as a counterbalance to insurgents in Iran. Is nation building in Iraq enough to provide that counter balance, or is the international community looking at another instance of a rogue group rising to fill the power vacuum? 

The African continent provides anther different type of issue for peacemaking and nation building. Strife with the African nations routinely spills over into other countries and regions. The conflict is civil in nature and is manipulated by many regional political players; it is almost impossible to control enough aspects to rebuild African nations from the outside perspective. 

African countries have routinely stated that internal conflict and strife is not the business of the international community. The African Union, formally the Organization of African Unity, has started to realize that the African continent will never be a major economic power with all of this continuing conflict that scares away tourist income and economic investment in general. When countries state that they do not want international help, is it still the responsibility of the international community to intervene? Is it within the mandate of the United Nations Security Council to violate sovereignty when told to stay out of the issue? 

The primary world powers are Western democratic states. Does this mean that all countries should be rebuilt in their likeness? How should cultural differences be taken into consideration? If the democratic Western ideal seems to be the most successful, does that mean it’s the only method to use? 

Nation building is difficult because most countries would rather not interfere in what could be a potentially nasty situation for the long term because nation building is not a short-term process. The resources that are needed for such an undertaking are available to only a few of the most economically stable countries. With that in mind, when the decision is made to intervene, who will pay the costs? 

Conclusion 

The Security Council only has as much power as the member states allow. Considering this, many of the issues will be discussed for a long time before reasonable solutions are found or even agreed upon. Each time they are addressed, however, represents a step in the right direction toward the original mandate of the SC as stated in the United Nations Charter. 

Notes: 

1. The United Nations Security Council can be accessed at www.un.org/Docs/sc/. 

2. The United Nations Charter 1:1:1 can be accessed at www.un.org/aboutun/charter/. 

3. The UN Charter 7:41. 

4. All of these resolutions can be accessed at www.un.org/Docs/sc/committees/INTRO.htm. 

5. This can be found on the SC website along with a list of their initiatives. 

6. The Center for Defense Information can be accessed at www.cdi.org. 

7. The International Atomic Energy Agency can be accessed at www.iaea.org. Information on Iraqi, Iranian and North Korean proliferation is abundant. 

8. Sam Roe. “Trafficking in stolen nuclear material on the rise,” Chicago Tribune, January 31, 2002. 

9. Please see www.cdi.org. 

10. Roe, Tribune. 

11. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty can be access at www.fas.org or www.un.org 

12. As stated by Mr. K.Y, Amoako, Executive Secretary, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa at the International Peace Academy Seminar on “Peace Building, Peacemaking, and Peacekeeping” on December 13, 1996. This can be accessed at www.uneca.org. 

13. SPIR-UNESCO Handbook, Peace, Security and Conflict Prevention, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Oxford University Press, 1998. 

Resources for Further Research: 

Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq can be accessed at www.casi.or.uk. 

Global Policy Forum can be accessed at www.globalpolicy.org. 

Summaries of sanctions programs can be found at the United States Treasury webpage at www.ustreas.gov. 

The Nuclear Energy Institute can be found at www.nei.org. 

The World Nuclear Association can be found at www.world-nuclear.org. 

Nuclear Information and Research Service can be found at www.nirs.org. 

Articles against nation building can be found at the CATO Institute at www.cato.org. 

United Nations Peacekeeping Operations can be found at www.un.org/Depts/dpko/. 

The World Affairs Council can be found at www.worldaffairsdc.org.