THOUGHTS PROVOKED BY THE NPT REVIEW CONFERENCE
GEORGE FAREBROTHER AND ROSLYN COOK, JUNE 2010
This account provides personal experience of events in New York at the five yearly Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the UN. It is not a detailed account of the negotiations. Others are better qualified for this.
Diplobubble at the UN
(A shorted form of this section appears in our Flame of Hope dossier).
Diplomats live in a bubble of their own. Around the UN Plaza the black limousines are drawn up ready to take members of the UN Missions the few yards to the UN building. This alone creates a suspicion that “We the People” of the United Nations are not at the top of the list of their concerns.
The UN itself makes little effort to make people welcome. Like hundreds of others, we had filled in all the right forms and were
assured that this would speed up our registration. The reality was a five hour queue with only two operatives to process us. Some people the day before had waited in the sun most of the morning and afternoon only to be told as they arrived near the end of the queue that the office was now closed. Even Mahatma Ghandi might have been tempted to kick the door down.
These insights set the scene for attempts by five people from Sussex to tell the UN Missions something interesting, exciting, and felt from the heart. It was a colourful and homely account, a booklet about a Flame of Hope walk along the South Coast of
England. We carried an Olympic Flame in relay from point to point. It involved hundreds of people and inspired many more along the way.
The aim of the relay was to raise awareness of the NPT Review Conference, its crucial importance and our heartfelt demand – negotiations for the global abolition of nuclear weapons – starting now. So we took the Flame of Hope to New York for the NPT and aimed to present the booklet to key diplomats.You can click here to read the booklet.
The first step was to email 36 missions; no answer. Then to email them again; no answer again. Then good old-fashioned faxing. Still no replies. So we tried cold calling in New York. Most of the missions are clumped together in forbidding towers. In some cases, even getting the lift to the right floor needed a messenger as “escort”.
