Armed with notebooks and pens, Fletcher students, undergraduates, and faculty members sat attentively Tuesday evening to hear a lecture by Under Secretary General of the United Nations Alvaro de Soto. Mediation in the UN was the announced lecture topic, but many came to hear the prominent speaker's recollections of his involvement in negotiations in Cyprus.
Approximately 30 people entered Cabot Auditorium to hear de Soto deliver a well-crafted, accessible speech on the practice of mediating disputes in the UN. The Peruvian native, who has worked in the UN for almost two decades, touched upon the issues of national sovereignty, regional organizations, and domestic conflict of social, ethnic, and religious origins, but focused mostly on the lecture's topic: the internal functioning of the UN, and specifically, its role in mediating conflicts and peacemaking.
Several members of the audience, particularly a handful of Greeks, inquired about the under secretary's opinion of current issues on the UN agenda, such as the Kashmir and Cyprus conflicts. They received brief, diplomatic answers.
De Soto is the special adviser on Cyprus to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and some students attended the lecture to hear a primary account of the situation. His speech, however, was mostly theoretical and only spotted with examples from personal experience.
"De Soto is responsible for the peace talks on Cyprus, so I'm interested to see what he has to say about their progress," sophomore Kyriakos Ashikalis, who is from Cyprus, said before the lecture. "I want to hear his views on the future, something good."
But the under secretary restricted his speech to the intricacies of mediating, listing "rules of thumb that apply to all mediators," including the need to be impartial, honest, and clear, as well as obtaining and maintaining trust from the different parties in the dispute. Although there is a natural tendency to avoid displeasing anyone by describing the reality of a situation, he said, mediators should not succumb to the temptation to be disingenuous.
"The truth should be told unvarnished," de Soto said, encouraging future diplomats to present truthful accounts in a private fashion so as not to embarrass the leader of a particular party in front of other disputants.
"Mediators face challenges," he said, noting his experiences with negotiating the peace agreements in El Salvador in 1992. The "proliferation of mediators," competition from regional organizations, and communication with Non-Governmental Organizations, are a few of the factors that mediators face when attempting to achieve a consensus between parties with conflicting goals and interests.
Although the role of the UN mediator is to seek "institutional friends of the secretary general" in non-principal actors, sometimes the debate table can become a "chamber orchestra with great soloists," de Soto said.
Timing is another aspect mediators and peacemakers are confronted with, and often there are moral and political discussions within the secretariat, he said. While the UN has a responsibility to promote human rights, deal with impunity, and resurface truths, humanitarian assistance efforts are sometimes fruitless, and the results of a war can sometimes yield better results.
"Should we jump into a pool where there is dubious amount of water?" de Soto asked.
The majority of the audience left the auditorium immediately after the lecture concluded, but some remained to ask questions of the under secretary. Conflicts in Kashmir and Cyprus, as well as the question of communication between formal negotiations and lobbying during mediation, the role of regional organizations, and the maturity of a conflict were concerns of the remaining audience members.
De Soto only granted a few minutes to address these questions - at least during the formal lecture. At the end of the speech, the Fletcher International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (INCR) club, which sponsored the event, presented the under secretary with a gift: a crystal sphere that read "Fletcher: Global Perspective."
Thomas Lank, the Fletcher student who organized the event, said the under secretary's speech was carefully prepared. "De Soto phrased his speech without jeopardizing the image of the UN and gave a lot of insight on decision-making and peacekeeping," Lank said.
After the speech, Maria Stephan, the co-coordinator of the INCR, noted the under secretary's points regarding mediation and his warning that if you raise the hopes of the parties involved, you put negotiations at risk. Although de Soto did not provide many personal examples to the crowd at Fletcher, Stephan said, he was able to recount his personal experiences at a previous luncheon with some of the INCR members.
One of the few personal experiences de Soto drew on was that of the peace agreements in El Salvador, where he admitted the UN made the error of not including financial institutions to resolve the conflict. The Bretton-Woods institutions (the World Bank and IMF) were necessary because institutions had to be built from scratch in El Salvador, de Soto said.
Some students said they would have preferred to hear more specific references to the undersecretary's experience. Freshman Theofanis Exadaktylos, who is Greek, said that he understands de Soto's diplomatic confidentiality, but expected to hear something novel about the conflict.
"I can definitely see his diplomatic identity when talking," Exadaktylos said. "He is a good orator and knows how to play around with words so that they still have the same meaning but don't reveal plans or insult any of the parties in conflict."
