Group of Governmental Experts on Disarmament Education

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

Group of Governmental Experts on Disarmament Education

Meeting April 19, 2001

Remarks by Felicity Hill, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Thank you for listening to the views of NGOs today during your first meeting. I hope we contribute to the issues and thoughts you have raised in your first session of brainstorming and conceptualising about how you will work together, the definition of disarmament and non-proliferation education, and the outcomes and texts your anticipate in 2002. As you go through this process, please do consider the kinds of encounters with NGO experts that you would find most helpful. We can better prepare our information and presentations if you identify the questions, the gaps, and the areas of most interest. Perhaps, after consultations with you through the secretariat, NGOs could organise a series of short events or panels either before or after or during your next meetings to feed into the changing focus of your discussion.

I am here to speak a little about the education my NGO does in the informal sector, as an example of the work NGO activists and experts do in public or community based education, outside of formal education structures, and I've brought some materials to show you. But first I am going to list some of the expectations and hopes that NGOs have of this process. I've done some surveying and here is the list:

- some of us are hoping for a report with some practical and useful annexes. These annexes could be suggested curricula, modules or disarmament education tools for the various constituencies listed in the resolution containing some of the key elements of successful disarmament education that you have unearthed through this process. These could be summarised in the text version, and be available electronically or on a CD rom. I think the constituencies listed by the resolution who are not educators: the parliamentarians, municiple leaders, military officers and government officials will benefit very much from actual practical materials tailored to their particular needs, to emerge from this process, even if its just presented as a range of information tools and techniques appropriate to, or as suggested by, each community.

- We hope this process has the effect of strengthening pre-existing initiatives of the United Nations, like the UN's School Bus, the interactive educational part of the UN's website for children which needs more materials on disarmament. We need more of the high quality occasional papers, studies and reports from the DDA, UNIDIR and the CTBTO. I want to draw your attention particularly to some excellent new materials created by the DDA and the Division for the Advancement of Women in consultation with NGOs. We hope the panel can encourage more materials like these.

- In addition, NGOs feel it would be helpful if the Expert Panel notices the untapped potential in collaboration between the UN system and NGO experts in the conceiving, producing, promotion, funding and especially, dissemination of publications on this matter. The UN and NGOs can work together more in producing and disseminating disarmament related materials, basic information, signs and posters in post-conflict zones, advertisements, videos, and public relations events, and we hope the panel encourages this.

- Some NGO felt the Expert Panelwould benefit from analysis of the lessons learned from the UN Disarmament Campaign that emerged from SSOD2. Some frank analysis of the products and programmes it produced could assist the Expert Panel in making recommendations. The purpose of the campaign was to "disseminate information and provide unimpeded access for all sections of the public to a broad range of information and opinion on questions of arms limitation and disarmament and the dangers relating to all aspects of the arms race, in particular, nuclear war." The campaign was to be carried out in all regions of the world in a balanced, factual and objective manner. My organization was involved in the regional disarmament seminars to which NGOs were invited, both as speakers and participants. The sense of those WILPF members involved is that finances played a some part in the campaigns demise, but the main reason is that governments did not and still do not want to encourage the development of a strong popular movement demanding disarmament. Just as governments do not wish to make the linkages between militarism and the environment in the CSD process, even though we all know that militarism is responsible for the greatest proportion of pollution. Just as governments routinely shut out the people, the NGOs on these matters. WILPF suspects that if governments really wanted to inform and educate their people about disarmament they could do it, but if they do not want to do it, the UN attempts will fail again. This, I suspect, will be your most difficult obstacle in this process.

- Some NGOs feel that the UN messengers for Peace and other celebrities could be brought into this process and could promote the issue of disarmament, which is often caught up in a technical and legalistic discourse. The DDA could accumulate some more messengers for peace devoted to this very issue and they could be brought in as the Expert Panel goes along, so as to be prepared upon the launching of the report. The need for celebrities goes to the heart of some of the issues on a culture of violence and a culture of peace. At this risk of offending everyone in this room, the issues of Peace and Disarmament and the people involved - NGOs and diplomats alike - have a very low cool rating. The current diplomatic exchange is not sufficiently interesting to sustain people who are less than fanatical or obsessed about this issue. Conference Room 4, or that terrible green room in Geneva cannot remain the only spectacles on offer, we need to acquire some grooviness, some contemporary relevance by association, and learn to package the idea of disarmament so that taboids can amplify our message. The suggested arms destruction events all over the world to celebrate the opening of the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms is one such opportunity and we should create more.

- One NGO person mentioned the potential of the expert group to engage publishers of text books,

- another suggested a world wide promotion and use of disarmament week, perhaps the focus of next years Disarmaemnt Week could be Disarmament Education, with events planned all over the world.

- Yet another suggested that a group of NGOs organise or commission an audit of television coverage and representation of weapons during a one week period in various countries, monitoring the presence of weapons and giving a report card, perhaps working with you in using your own countries as examples.

- I am not at all a supporter of the Global Compact with Corporations or so-called Partnerships between the UN and the for-profit sector for a whole range of reasons. I do not believe that partnership is possible between entities with such radically different goals. However, I think engagement, rather than partnership, is vital. Perhaps this Expert Panel could test this form of engagement and call on some of the major arms manufacturers to give some analysis of the kinds of advertising and educational materials they produce to go with their various weapons systems.

Now I will move on to a brief show and tell session on the efforts and the impact that NGOs make using informal education outreach and educational materials.

In a discussion on Disarmament Education, the Secretary General's Disarmament Advisory Board was told about the Reaching Critical Will Project in a speech by Betty Reardon last year. RCW was started to build political expectations around the NPT Review Conference, and to enhance NGO preparation and participation. We created an electronic repository of information on our website reachingcriticalwill.org on which people could find reading guides, fact sheets, press kits, basic texts, data bases of NGO and governmental disarmament contacts in Geneva, new York and in capitals. We also had a chat room. We created an educational video, 1000 of which were distributed along with a reading guide. We conducted 11 training sessions before the NPT, 5 in the US, 4 in Europe, one in Australia and the other in Costa Rica, and three orientation sessions during the NPT. We also produced a daily newsletter that was online & distributed. I've gathered some of these materials into the packet for distribution. Many NGOs go through a similar process while they are campaigining, about the arms trade, National Missile Defence, a particular corporation, or a particular conflict. Please do consult our webpage and the NGO Links contained therein, to get a cross range of the materials and information made available by NGOs.

RCW's new outreach materials include a series of three posters and postcards, a booklet anticipating the next NPT Review Conference in 2005 with analysis of what could be achieved between now and then, a series of fact sheets on the Dirtiest Dozen corporations coming out on May 1, tailored specifically for the anti-globalisation community, and some resources for people educating about nuclear disarmament.

The latter project will be ready for your next meeting but is in draft form now. We are creating a booklet for activists, grassroots and community based informal educators, preparing them to give the nuclear disarmament message which is really quite difficult because what a handful of countries can do to the world is very, very scary. People want to believe that nuclear weapons have gone away so we have to wrestle with the fact that people do not want to know about it. Who can blame them? Repackaging this issue so that it is hopeful is difficult, especially after the widespread use of fear as a campaigning tool in the 80's. But after consulting with many people that routinely do this work, we have identified the need to incorporate into any education effort material about ways of coping with, and processing the emotional response. Our booklet will cover that material. To go with the booklet we are creating what I'm calling a bag of tricks for these encounters which we are dividing into Fact Sheets, Activity Sheets and Overheads. The Fact Sheets on weapons, power, waste and mining put information on to one page, they include case studies of each link in the nuclear fuel chain. The Activity sheets are for younger people - crosswords, reading comprehension exercises, questionnaires, multiple choice etc. The Overheads are useful tools for speakers, charts showing the number of weapons, the number of tests, the public opinion polls etc.

- Another example I'd like to draw your attention to is the use a MNWC as a tool to explore the political, legal and technical requirements for nuclear disarmament. The Model NWC was submitted as a UN document by Costa Rica in 1997 and has since gone on to stimulate a lot of discussion in legal classrooms around the world, and also in the diplomatic and NGO community. The NWC Monitor is a publication that records that discussion and they are available here today.

Thank you for your time today.