Vienna Center Marks Decade of NGO-U.N. Collaboration on Palestine

By Don Betz

The Vienna International Center, still recovering from the impact last summer of the World Conference on Human Rights and its 5,000 NGO observers, was the venue in late August for the 10th annual U.N.–sponsored International Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) Meeting on the Question of Palestine. About 100 NGOs from Europe and the Middle East, with a scattering from North and South America, Africa and Asia, worked through an agenda organized around panels rather than workshops on the eve of the announcement of the ''Gaza-Jericho-first'' agreement.

The decade of U.N.-NGO collaboration began in the fall of 1983, when the United Nations convened the International Conference on the Question of Palestine. It was such a controversial subject that most seasoned U. N. hands predicted the gathering would never take place. The original venue at UNESCO headquarters in Paris was abandoned after orchestrated pressure on the French government resulted in an announcement that security for the meeting would be difficult.

The conference then was switched to U.N. headquarters in Geneva's stately Palais des Nations. There the Swiss government reacted to what was described by the Western media at the time as a ''terrorist conference" with elaborate precautions. These included barbed wire encircling the Palais, armored personnel carriers every 100 meters, signs in four languages declaring that visitors should halt if so directed, establishing of emergency medical facilities, and sweeps of the premises three times daily by bomb-sniffing guard dogs. No one was certain who was being protected from whom.

Despite press predictions that few would attend, the response was gratifying. Some 138 governments, numerous U.N. agencies, 25 eminent individuals and 104 NGOs (including 10 from Israel) participated for a week in substantive and significant debate.

(The writer of this article was a U.N. employed organizer of the conference. The American Educational Trust, publisher of this magazine, was one of the pioneer U.S. NGOs represented, providing much of the literature distributed to the delegates in Geneva. )

There were two recognized results of the ICQP. One was the Geneva Declaration on Palestine, which called for the convening of the International Peace Conference under the auspices of the U.N. Another result was the advent of a network of non-governmental organizations active on the question of Palestine.

The dialogue among the multinational NGOs at that time was unprecedented. It stimulated the work of the U.N.'s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) and the U.N.'s Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) after the secretariat for the conference was dissolved.

The enthusiastic response of non-governmental organizations at the international conference redirected U.N. efforts to include sustained outreach to the relevant NGO community worldwide. First an interim committee was convened in 1984, and then an international NGO coordinating committee (ICCP) was created in 1986.

Regional committees were organized in North America and Europe about the same time. Each of these regions accounted for an astonishing number of active NGOs, considering the fact that Palestine was not located in either region. Directors for the other regions subsequently were established along with the Local Coordinating Committee (OPT) and the Israeli Coordinating Committee.

With the establishment of the ICCP office in Geneva in 1986, the NGO movement on Palestine accelerated its activities, producing regular newsletters and special background reports. Action alerts designed to inform and mobilize the international NGO community on relevant issues were communicated throughout the network and beyond. Both the intifada and the fax machine inspired further growth of the NGO network and development of the ICCP as a coordinating mechanism. By 1990, as more and more NGOs engaged in lobbying efforts in Western nations, over 1,000 organizations active on the question of Palestine were registered with the ICCP.

Over the past decade, the roles of the U.N. and the NGOs on the question of Palestine have evolved and their interrelationship has become more symbiotic in the formulation and execution of United Nations work on the question of Palestine.

"Guardian Angels"

Both the U. N. and NGOs have been decisively influenced by the Palestinians themselves, particularly through the intifada, the Palestinian NGOs and the input of the permanent observers of Palestine to the United Nations. In 1989, the U.N. and NGO network were termed by one media observer as the ''guardian angels" of the Palestinian people. Over the past decade, both have assisted Palestinians and have served as sources of information and a popular, global conscience on the question of Palestine.

The limitations of the NGO network and process are well known. Finances and coordination remain perpetual and formidable obstacles. Each day, each campaign, each special initiative or action alert has become a challenge "to do even more with even less." Genuine understanding, awareness and appreciation of the role of NGOs in some societies remains elusive because NGO commitment and resolve seldom are matched by the resources required to utilize modern means of communication and make NGOs effective in their various societies.

Newsletters, public manifestations, peaceful demonstrations and testimony, speakers' tours, the Peace Conference Information Project and the Fax Tree represent a few of the methods of communicating with the global chain of NGOs of every size and description and with the public. Partly as a result, the global public knows more and thinks more positively about Palestinians today than it did in 1983.

But, for NGOs, questions of assessment and accountability remain. This work must be judged by simple, human measures. Did it shorten the occupation by a single day? Did it change one person's pejorative perception of Palestinians and their struggle? Did our work make it more difficult for the legions of media apologists for the Israeli occupation to maintain undeserved credibility? Did our efforts save a single house, a single dunum of land, a single life? Is any Palestinian child safer today because of what we dare to do?

These are the criteria by which to judge the relevance and utility of our work. Unfortunately in the 10 years in which non-governmental cooperation with the U.N. on the question of Palestine has improved, the daily living circumstances of Palestinians has deteriorated.

The term "human rights'' has sounded like a pious platitude when uttered on the streets of Khan Younis or at a checkpoint on any road to Jerusalem. Nearly 40 Palestinians under occupation died violently at the hands of Israelis last May alone. And at least one-fourth of the victims were children. The occupied territories have become de facto bantustans, Jerusalem has been detached from the last remnant of Palestine, and Gaza has been described as the world's largest prison. These are a few of the fruits of an illegal, immoral and perennial occupation.

These inhumane circumstances cannot be left unchallenged, cannot be rationalized or combated with resignation or silence. They compel NGOs to refuse, individually and in concert, to accept the status quo. Whether NGOs act in neighborhoods and towns or present the issue to an international forum such as the World Conference on Human Rights, they are united in their rejection of "the ways things are" and strive for "the way things should be.''

The NGO movement has progressed over the past decade. In the coming one, its focus will shift from self-determination and human rights to include economic and human development in a Palestine with a flag, a capital and citizens with passports. Collaboration with the U.N. will broaden and diversify, and new NGOs will be attracted to the common effort in building this ancient land and new state.

It was clear in the first months of the intifada that Palestinians were creating the new Palestine, stone by stone. In March 1993, Khan Younis families made homeless by Israeli rockets, mortars and bulldozers scrawled on the tent serving as their makeshift homes this defiant message: "You have destroyed our home . . . now we will build a state."

Don Betz, Ph.D., is vice president of university relations and political science professor at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK He is chairman of the U.N. International Coordinating Committee on the Question of Palestine.