#untac

[untacguner]

Tumblr'da 7. yılımı dolduruyorum 🥳

[yishibashi01]

断捨離してたら、 #外で着られないＴシャツコレクション が増えた。 #カンボジア #pko #untac #1993

[squirrelingbeaver]

Thant Myint-U on criticisms of UNTAC's human rights work in Cambodia from 1992-1993

Thant Myint-U served as a Human Rights Officer in the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia, whose mandate ran from 1992-1993. The following is an extract from an interview with him conducted by James Sutterlin for the Yale-UN Oral History project:

JS: A good many of the external NGOs, at least, were critical of the human rights work in Cambodia. I think that probably is the area that was most subject to criticism. Why, do you think? What was the basis? 

TMU: Of their criticism? I don’t think it was so much a criticism of the component, I think it was more criticism that the UN in general, the operation in general, didn’t do more to create a better human rights environment in the run-up to the election. I think, though, again, that given the time-frame that we had --- ‘we’ meaning UNTAC as a whole --- and the limited resources, it would have been very difficult to do much more. Obviously, we could have taken stronger action, I think we could have used our power to dismiss officials much earlier and much more widely. Perhaps the special prosecutor’s office, something like that, could have been set-up earlier. I mean, there were things that we could have done, and perhaps that would have marginally moved things in the right direction, but I don’t think that we would have had anything like genuinely... well, we wouldn’t have had an environment that we were all happy with for elections, even if all those things were done. In a year, or a year-and-a-half, there is no way that you can take a country in Cambodia’s situation and change it completely. I think that that was obvious to everyone then, and it is obvious to people now.

I would say that in a way the criticism shouldn’t be that we didn’t do enough, or UNTAC didn’t do enough, within the frame-work of the mission to do more to improve human rights. I think it should be a much more general criticism of not just UNTAC but the way in which the whole peace agreement and the setting up of the mission was structured, in the sense that the whole thing was so focused on the elections, and the form of the elections, rather than trying to improve people’s lives, both in terms of their ability to exercise basic political and civil rights, as well as other things, as a part of our much longer-term project of democratizing or trying to build a stable democracy in that country. I think there was much too much focus, not just by UNTAC but in general, in everyone’s approach, on holding elections the year after an international operation was deployed --- which then, as we’ve all seen now in hind-sight, didn’t really lead to a lasting democracy --- rather than concentrating on a much wider effort to create foundations for a better government, which might have meant, for example, a lot more emphasis on reconstruction and aid and for instance that link between human rights and reconstruction was never anything that was really thought through before the operation was set up. I think in the future, if there is any sort of operation like this, there needs to be much more attention given to what within a year we can actually do to change a society, given that our impact will probably be very minimal anyway, rather than simply having elections and then leaving... 

Source: http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh/bitstream/handle/123456789/2699/Thant%20Myint-U.pdf?sequence=1