By Poppy McPherson @poppymcp
IRIN Contributor
YANGON, 17 July 2017
To his surprise, UN
resident coordinator Renata Lok-Dessallien advised against it.
“She suggested to me
not to visit Rakhine State, offering no reasons why I shouldn’t go there,”
Quintana told IRIN in a recent interview. “And then she tried not to be
associated with any human rights approach to the situation.”
Lok-Dessallien’s
advice at the time sums up a schism that has plagued the UN in Myanmar
throughout her tenure, and has contributed to a divided and “glaringly
dysfunctional” mission, according to internal UN documents provided to IRIN.
While Lok-Dessallien
leads the camp that advocates working with the government and focusing on
development as a solution to Myanmar’s problems, others argue that the
government has done little to address many human rights issues – most
significantly those affecting minority ethnic Rohingya Muslims – and they say
the UN needs to stand up to the government.
The UN recently said
that Lok-Dessallien will be rotated out of Myanmar, even though she is only
three and a half years into a term that usually runs for five years or more.
But the UN denied reports she was being fired due to her performance, announcing instead the “elevation” of her position to
that of an assistant secretary-general. http://mm.one.un.org/content/unct/myanmar/en/home/news/un-statement-on-resident-coordinator-in-myanmar.html
Interviews with former and current UN staff,
as well as reviews of two internal documents, indicate that the new UN
secretary general Antonio Guterres has decided to change the leadership structure
to allow the Myanmar mission to put forward a more united front – a position
that would take into account both development and human rights concerns.
A spokesperson for
the office of resident coordinator Lok-Dessallien said she had “provided full
support” to Quintana’s visit and added: “We have prioritised human rights as
well as the other pillars of the United Nations, namely peace and security,
development and humanitarian assistance.”
Former and current
UN staff members disputed that, and internal reports documented dissension
within the UN mission over its failure to stand up for human rights.
“It’s no secret that
Renata was prioritising the development side, to the frustration of individuals
within agencies whose mandate is humanitarian protection,” said one former UN
staffer who requested anonymity.
Development
vs human rights
In recent years,
friction and antipathy within the UN team have been something of an open secret
in Myanmar. Humanitarians, who see rights abuses at the root of crises that
involve displacement, hunger, violence, and statelessness, want to raise the
alarm, according to several insider sources. They voice resentment about
development people who keep quiet for the sake of relationships with the
government, which they have to work with to improve people’s lives. Each thinks
the other is morally bankrupt, naive, or both.
At the heart of much
of the infighting has been the plight of the Rohingya in Rakhine, a state on
the western border with Bangladesh. They are denied citizenship, live under
virtual apartheid, and have been interned in displacement camps in their tens
of thousands since 2012. Rohingya accounted for the vast majority of those who
were killed or were chased from their homes during violence that year involving
majority ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.
During the more than
three years that Lok-Dessallien has been at the helm of the Myanmar team, she
has favoured a passive approach. Others – especially as the situation for the
Rohingya drastically worsened – have urged action and accountability.
Tensions between UN
agencies that focus on development, and those that focus on human rights and
humanitarian crises – such as the human rights agency, OHCHR, and the emergency
aid coordination body, OCHA – have grown so bitter that the UN mission was
condemned to “irrelevance” in a memo sent to Guterres.
Under the former
secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, these divisions went unresolved, insiders say.
Lok-Dessallien, until early this year, had a strong ally in her boss Helen
Clark, the former head of the United Nations Development Programme.
Senior officials
have now opted for a radical restructuring of the Myanmar country team that
would remove Lok-Dessallien and replace her with someone with more political
clout. Whoever fills the new position of assistant secretary-general will
report directly to Guterres.
The leaked documents
and interviews with current and former UN staffers, describe a country team
that became so internally fractured, specifically but not exclusively over the
crisis in Rakhine State, that a major shake-up was deemed necessary.
‘Growing
irrelevance’
“The United Nations
in-country presence in Myanmar continues to be glaringly dysfunctional,” stated
an April 2017 memo sent to Guterres. “Strong tensions exist within the UN
country team, the humanitarian parts of the UN system find itself having to
confront the hostility of the development arm, while the human rights pillar is
seen as complicating both.
“The impact of this
dysfunctionality is a growing irrelevance of the UN in guiding and defining the
international community’s efforts to address the challenges confronting
Myanmar,” it continued, adding that donors were turning elsewhere.
The memo put the
dysfunctionality down, in part, to structural problems. The role of
resident-coordinator is inherently flawed, it argued: he or she does not report
directly to the UN secretary-general’s office but to the UNDP, and is therefore
more focused on development than politics.
“Unfortunately, the
position of coordinator of the UN’s development efforts lacks the mandate, the
capacity, the expertise and thus the credibility to be taken seriously as a
political player,” it said.
Lok-Dessallien’s
defenders stress that any resident-coordinator has a complex job, tasked with
overseeing the work of numerous agencies, each with different mandates. But she
was also widely described as unapologetic in the exclusion of politics from her
work.
A confidential 2015
report commissioned for OHCHR described a culture of secrecy where agencies
refused to share crucial information with each other, let alone make it
available to the public. The report accused Myanmar’s UN team of excessive
subservience to the government, and recommended the team take a stronger public
stance on rights.
“Myanmar as a state
has plenty of capacity to resolve the situation in Rakhine, but it is not
choosing to do so,” said the internal report. “Addressing this problem of
political will requires a combination of private and public advocacy.”
Human
Rights Up Front
Within the UN’s
recent history lies a cautionary tale about dealing with these kinds of
tensions.
During the bloody
final months of Sri Lanka’s long civil war, as the army closed in on the rebel
Tamil Tigers, there were 300,000 civilians trapped between the front lines.
Tens of thousands of them were killed. But the UN declined to publish mounting
casualty numbers and staff members who brought up threats to civilians were
punished.
An internal probe commissioned afterwards by Ban, then UN
secretary-general, found a “continued reluctance” among UN staff “to stand up
for the rights of people they were mandated to assist”. http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/Sri_Lanka/The_Internal_Review_Panel_report_on_Sri_Lanka.pdf
The report for OHCHR
on Myanmar drew parallels to Sri Lanka. It noted that the approximately 100,000
Rohingya now living in camps are referred to as internally displaced people, or
IDPs. But rather than IDP camps, the squalid clusters of monsoon-battered
shelters “would more accurately be described as detention camps or internment
camps, because the privations and restrictions of movement imposed on the
Rohingya are so extreme.”
“The situation bears
a striking resemblance to the humanitarian community’s systematic failure in
the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka, during which hundreds of thousands of
Tamils were held against their will in internment camps that were fully paid
for and serviced by international humanitarian institutions,” said the report.
After the tragedy in
Sri Lanka, Ban created an initiative intended to prevent such a situation from
arising again, called Human Rights Up Front.
The author of that
initiative, former UN assistant secretary-general Charles Petrie, who led the
Sri Lanka internal probe, told IRIN the way the policy has been implemented in
Myanmar has been “very confused” and demonstrates “a poor understanding of what
Rights Up Front is all about”.
“Right now what you
have is one group of human rights [advocates] and humanitarians who believe the
UN should play a much more forceful role, and you have the development
advocates who consider it a pain,” he said. “In actual fact you need to find
something that’s a bit more common ground.”
The spokesperson for
Lok-Dessallien’s office said the Human Rights Up Front policy has been rolled
out across all UN agencies in Myanmar and “its implementation by the resident
coordinator and the UN country team has been praised by the UN headquarters in
New York.”
New
strategy
Whatever its
approach, the UN has little to show for its efforts in Rakhine.
In the more than 20
years the organisation has been in the northern part of the state, conditions
have never been worse. Thousands of Rohingya have been brought to the brink of
starvation. The World Food Programme said this
month that it expects about 80,500 children to need treatment for acute
malnutrition this year in Rohingya-majority areas where the government and
military have blocked access to aid groups. http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/WFP-0000019264.pdf
Security forces began carrying out
counter-insurgency operations in those areas last October, following deadly
attacks on border police posts by a new group calling itself the Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army. Rights organisations have compiled evidence of military
abuses of Rohingya civilians – including mass rapes, killings, and torture –
which OHCHR said in a February report were “the
very likely commission of crimes against humanity”. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21142
The dramatic
escalation of violence in Rakhine State likely caught Lok-Dessallien offguard,
said Quintana, the former human rights envoy to Myanmar. While she continued to
favour a development-led approach, her colleagues at OHCHR were issuing
strongly-worded statements and reports critical of the government and the
military.
“It seems that, in
the country, what is required is at least a common strategy,” he said.
Recent statements
from UN headquarters in New York indicate that change is afoot.
In a 5 July speech, Guterres laid out plans for reform of the
resident coordinator position throughout the UN. He said the “consultations and
analysis” done by his office indicated the role should report directly to the
secretary-general and not to UNDP. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2017-07-05/secretary-generals-remarks-economic-and-social-council-repositioning
Myanmar may serve as
the test case.