Education through film: showing the relevance of the UN.

I have been dumbfounded over the last two years at how many times people have come up to me announcing that the United Nations has become irrelevant. Knowing that I teach and write about the UN, they have sought me out specifically to make this claim. It is hard to reply in a few words to these pronouncements and convince doubters that the world Organization is actually functioning just as it always has in addressing humanitarian needs, deploying peacekeeping troops, seeking peaceful solutions to conflicts, and struggling to get Member States to act collectively in the name of international peace and security. The only way to address these ups and downs in support of the UN is to better educate people on what it does. And one way to do that is through film.

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As former Executive Director of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), I worked on producing and directing, with ACUNS support, a documentary film titled "Uncertain Soil: the Story of United Nations Peacekeeping". Far from being irrelevant, the United Nations has sent some sixty peacekeeping operations into the field since 1948. All these missions have required collective action and decision-making by Member States that have so far sent, taking into consideration rotation, a total of some 1 million soldiers to uncertain soil in lands far away from home to keep the peace. Over $26 billion have been spent and more than 1,800 men and women have paid with their lives. And far from pulling back from tough assignments, the United Nations is determined to address new challenges with robust mandates under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Some 12,000 UN troops are still on the ground in Sierra Leone; the operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will have over 10,000 peacekeepers under the able leadership of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, William Lacey Swing; and the Security Council has authorized 15,000 troops for Liberia. All these are complex operations that several years ago many said the United Nations was unwilling to take on.

Blame it on the Brahimi report, the fear of humiliation after Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the realization that these conflicts cannot be allowed to fester out of control, but Member States seem willing to tackle these messy problems with the mature attitude of settling in for the long haul. When the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) was established in 1992, only twelve years ago, peacekeeping had been run out of the "back office" on a case-by-case basis with a handful of staff. Now DPKO has some 600 people with different skills and tasks. All this is a sign that Member States are now taking peacekeeping seriously as a core activity of the Organization.

It is time that this history is told, and the film is an attempt to reach out to students and the general public with what we hope is a compelling story. "Uncertain Soil" covers the gambit, from the first UN Emergency Force in the Suez to Cyprus, Western Sahara, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sierra Leone and Kosovo, and from traditional peacekeeping to the most complex operations and the politics behind the scenes. The crew shot over 100 hours of digital film that was combined and edited with UN archival footage and photos. The Department of Public Information (DPI) and its Under-Secretary-General, Shashi Tharoor, gave their full support in many ways for the film.

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Research was extensive. There were interviews with some of the most outstanding UN peacekeeping experts, such as Brian Urquhart and Alvaro de Soto, along with Special Representatives like Jacques Klein and William Lacey Swing. The film tells the story of desk officers, military observers and troop commanders, and shows first-hand the work of individual peacekeepers doing their daily tasks, whether destroying weapons collected under the disarmament/demobilization programmes or finding solutions to crises brewing in refugee camps. This is what people need to see for themselves: the United Nations doing very relevant work around the world.

The 110-minute film had its world premier screening at UN Headquarters in New York on 26 May 2004 in connection with International Peacekeeping Day (29 May). ACUNS greatly appreciates the support of DPI and the financial contributions of the Better World Fund, the Newman Foundation, the Arthur Ross Foundation and Soka Gakkai International for making the film possible. Copies can be purchased at www.acuns.wlu.ca.

Jean Krasno is a Fellow at International Security Studies and an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. She was Executive Director of ACUNS from 1998 to 2003 and served as Associate Director of a Yale University project focused on UN reform, which produced in 1995 a report titled "The United Nations In Its Second Half-Century".

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