I must confess I do not know much about theatre in Zimbabwe. In fact I don’t know much about it in general. And my only visit to a theatre performance in Harare was to Reps half a year ago. It was then and there that fists flew when the Big House met the Small House in a play called “Married versus Single.” Just couldn’t resist the title. And true: it WAS fun. With HIFA rocking Harare this month, I realized I should learn more about theatre. (See HIFA’s 2011 engagements with Zimbabwean community)
“Married versus Single” (image courtesy of Zimbojam)
Searching the net about Zimbabwe doesn’t give you much compared to theatre scenes in other English-speaking countries. Yet at the end of last year, Stephen Chifunyise, Zimbabwe’s well-known playwright and culture analyst, published a comprehensive survey in The Herald. Reflecting on the achievements in 2011 he wrote:
The first major success highlight of the 2011 theatre season which demonstrated the potential for a vibrant and viable theatre industry in Zimbabwe were the more than 25 new plays which were world premiered during the year. Those plays that have been included in this impressive list of new plays are those whose productions were reported in the media. Therefore, if one includes those new plays presented by community theatre groups, colleges and schools but were not reported by the media, our 2011 theatre production may even reach a 40 plays mark.
Siyaya arts group from Makokoba township in Bulawayo was featured in-style in the first issue of the Inspiration Avenue magazine, a Zimbabwean lifestyle publication
In his article in The Herald, Chifunyise listed a number of successful premiers. Among those, he mentioned his own “365”and Blessing Hungwe‘s “Burn Mukwerekwere Burn.”
At this stage, I wanted to find out a bit more of the behind-the-scenes story of theatre production in Zimbabwe’s capital. I spoke to Blessing Hungwe, one of the protagonists of Harare theatre. I first met him at a regular meeting of the re-vitalized Zimbabwe Writer’s Association back in March. A week later, we were sitting on a stone bench in the Harare Gardens chatting about Blessing’s work. (See Every nation needs an international festival II: Harare vs Cape Town? and Zimbabwean hospitality)
AK: When did you first discover your passion for theatre?
BH: As early as high school when I was studying in Gweru. Then I moved to Harare where I met Stanley Mambo who was a big theatre practitioner back then before he moved to Malawi. He was into physical theatre. In 2007, I started my own small independent production company.
Reps Theatre in Harare (image courtesy of twinarts.co.zw)
AK: How would you describe the theatre scene in Harare?
BH: Harare is sort of split into two theatre movements: there’s the Reps crew, which is mostly into repertory production. They just re-do old-school productions and reinvent them for the Harare scene. They keep theatre alive throughout the whole year. Then we have Theatre in the Park, which is another venue just by the Harare Gardens. They stage contemporary Zimbabwean works. That’s where we mostly stage our plays.
AK: And what are your works about?
BH: I mostly deal with socio-economic issues in my plays. My last major play “Burn Mukwerekwere Burn” is about xenophobia.
AK: What are you working on now?
BH: In the play that I am preparing for HIFA [the interview took place in March 2012], I deal with the girl-child trafficking in Zimbabwe. It’s very rife these days. Girls are being trafficked from the rural areas to Harare. They are being trafficked from Harare to South Africa and all over Southern Africa. Zimbabwe has become a kind of hub for the trafficking.
AK: What creative techniques do you use when you work on a play?
BH: When I write, I usually try to run away from facts. What often happens in Zimbabwean productions is our plays become highly rhetorical. We sort of blurt out the facts from the stage. We should try to make it subtle to let our viewers enjoy unravelling the play.
AK: What do you expect from HIFA this year?
BH: For me, HIFA is the major platform to premier my work. Most of my works are artistic. So they need an artistic audience to appreciate them. I prefer premiering my work at HIFA, seeking a discerning audience against whom I can then measure myself. And, from the experience, the plays that are shown at HIFA are bound to travel outside Zimbabwe. By doing this, Zimbabwean productions can benefit from and contribute to the development of other countries’ creative industries.
AK: What are some of the challenges facing Zimbabwean theatre internationally?
BH: Actually, when we were working on a TV series, I was in the midst of writing “Burn Mukwerekwere Burn”. You write at night, while shooting the drama during the day. You get stuck sometimes when you are writing. I got stuck on a piece – didn’t know what to do with a certain character. And it was during the shoot one of those days that I realized how to introduce a character in my play that I had long struggled to. That’s how I broke into that character. (See Afriwood to participate in 2012 Ukrainian Content Market)
Our conversation ends and in parting Blessing tells me that his company received an award from National Arts Merit Awards this year. He also shares his plans to train young residents of Chitungwiza to help them become professionals both in theatre and television.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years some other dummy will be unravelling the behind-the scenes stories helped by Blessing’s students in the run up to HIFA. Sitting on the same stone bench in the autumnal Harare Gardens.
You can write to Andy Kozlov on a.kozlov@steppesinsync.com
Zaha Hadid, Iraqi-British winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize (image courtesy of hughpearman.com)
You can work in a McDonald’s and survive. But who are we? What is our heritage? S a d a M i r e
They are both women leaders born to the predominately Muslim nations. Forced to leave for the Western world, where they received education, Dr Sada Mire of Somaliland and Zaha Hadid of Iraq traveled back to their home countries to do creative projects and uplift the lives of the local communities by re-branding their motherlands.
Dr Sada Mire posing for the “Discover Magazine” (photo by Graham Trott, Grooming: Claire Hanson)
The world’s only active Somali archaeologist, Sada lived the first fifteen years of her life in Mogadishu, until 1991, when she settled in Sweden, as a result of the conflict in the Horn of Africa. She studied at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, for her B.A., and then at University College London for her M.A. and Ph.D., conducting field research in Somaliland.
Sada is currently advisor to and former Director of the Republic of Somaliland’s Department of Tourism & Archaeology, which she founded in 2007. Mohamed Abdi Ali, who works for the department, estimated that since, for example, the Lass Geel site was opened in 2002, between 50 and 60 tourists come to the area each month.
Dr Sada Mire is founder and executive director of the Horn Heritage Organization that assists the mapping of all monuments and sites of Somaliland and the creation of Somaliland National Heritage Law. In pursuit to preserve the Somali heritage, HHO plans to build a centre in Hargeysa for scientific research facility, storage and education. At the moment, the Somaliland government and delegates from the Paul-Valéry Universityin France are collaborating on a project to develop archaeological sites in Somaliland. (See How culture contributes to development: an UNESCO indicator suite)
Sada has worked as a technical assistant for the UNDP in Somalilandon cultural resource management and capacity building. Sada has conducted fieldwork in several European and African countries – from the UK and Denmark to Kenya and Egypt. She is a TED-Speaker. (See The Creator Of TED reinvents conferencing again) Sada believes that cultural heritage is a basic human need.
When she first came back to Somalia as a PhD student, Sada discovered that no one was funding culture in Somaliland, not even the government. “So after four years of giving talks and screaming and running all over the world and telling everyone what is happening, the UN decided to fund my position with the government.”
In Somaliland, there is poverty after the war. This is a country that has been totally destroyed. In Somalia, we still have a war. (See The worst music with the best intentions? Insights on a Zimbabwean fundraising tune for Somalia) I went to Somaliland because that is the only place where I can actually do my work. There is peace there. Since it’s not a recognised country, it does not have support and humanitarian assistance that a country, which is part of the UN would have. [Somalia, the recognized state never ratified the World Heritage Convention, by the way] (See Whose premise: UNESCO-Harare or UNESCO-Paris?)
I’m trying to get people to realise the importance of heritage and guide them in that context. I go to the rural areas where the sites are based. When they see my work, they realise the discovered sites are important and could become potential world heritage sites that can help them to develop economically, educationally and help them in their identity building.
The explanation on Somaliheritage.org sheds more light on the paralysis caused by the absence of international mechanisms within the UN system to protect the heritage of non-member states:
The UN member nation-state of Somalia consists today of a war-torn society made of three new regions, these are Somaliland, Puntland and south-central Somalia. Somaliland is a break-away state with its own government which seeks an international recognition as an independent nation-state. Puntland is a semiautonomous region. Puntland and south-central Somalia are still facing instabilities due to ongoing war and piracy.
Furthermore, severe poverty and prolonged droughts threaten all Somali regions. The archaeology of Somalia, Puntland and Somaliland is disappearing systematically. Some people are destroying the archaeological heritage by looting and clandestine excavations. Archaeology has become a source to feed upon. Since severe poverty mostly triggers the destruction the solution to the problem needs to be multiple. The potentials of cultural heritage resources must be highlighted to the current looters and it must be made explicit how future possibilities for education, job opportunities and tourism can benefit them in the long term.
Most of the archaeological sites suffer also the environmental changes; parts of the country have undergone desertification, particularly in north-eastern part of the country.
Talking to the Discover Magazine, Sada explained her interest in archeology as career:
The world’s only active Somali archaeologist, Sada Mire (photo courtesy of BBC)
When I was a refugee, I studied Scandinavian archaeology because I wanted to understand my new surroundings. After learning about European culture, I became interested in my own past.
When she came across a book by Basil Davidson, Africa: The Story of A Continentand saw the images of Ashanti people holding and wearing gold, the sculptures of Ife, Nok and Ethiopia, she soon realised there wasn’t much study about African archaeology or history. “Its like there were all these previous civilisations, which colonialism has taken away from us and one of the passages I read was that in order to understand African history, there needs to be archaeologists who excavate the history of Africa. There is what the English wrote, what the Arabs wrote but where is what the Africans wrote? And that made me want to study it.”
Even though, her work has been limited to Somaliland which, unlike the rest of Somalia, remains relatively peaceful, travelling between towns Sada employs guards armed with AK-47s. The roads themselves are treacherous, and landmines and deadly snakes litter the countryside where many of the archaeological sites are found. Some sites are also now secured by armed guards, to prevent looters. The country as yet has no museums. (See Steppes In Figures #4: Southern Africa trivia from last year)
One of the problems Sada has had to deal with is how to define mobile, nomadic heritage. In Somalia they carry cultural heritage in their heads. It’s not something you can point to and say, ‘Isn’t this a fantastic building?’ Their cultural heritage is much more difficult to define.
Intangible Cultural Heritage means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.
For Somalia, ICH includes knowledge of the (nomadic) landscape, oral culture, portable houses, city life, survival during the civil war–what Sada calls a knowledge-centered approach.
Sada regards national heritage as a human right, crucial to a nation’s sense of itself even during a time of conflict and famine. Speaking to Outlook from the BBC World Service, she further explains the effect of her attempts at re-branding Somalia on her people’s lives, “When we find sites and I am able to tell local people about the importance of the site and the potential that can come from it – its significance for world heritage – it gives them dignity and pride. Our culture is very oral, so people need to hear from somebody and they repeat it. People immediately feel that they have something, a resource. They can say, ‘We may not have a lot but if we can take care of this site, we have something.’”
Inside of a “tower house” in Old Sana’a (image courtesy of the Saudi Aramco World)
Dr Sada Mire is not the first promoter of heritage preservation in an Islamic nation that used the media to draw attention of the international community and change UN policies. One doesn’t need to swim far in search for examples. Just across the Gulf of Aden. As was reminded to us by Eric Hansen, the author of Motoring with Mohammed – Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea and a frequent contributor to Saudi Aramco World, in 1970, the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini produced a 15-minute documentary, The Walls of Sana‘a, which he sent to the UNESCO as an appeal for international help to save the old city of the Yemeni capital. Back then, Pasolini visited Sana‘a for a few days to film his famous The Decameron and was struck by Sana’a and shocked at the prospect of ‘modernization,’ a ‘development’ wave that two decades later swept through Beijing and characterized Pasolisini’s native Italy after the Second World War. Now the Old City of Sana’a is an UNESCO World Heritage Site.
When Zaha Hadid (who was born on the opposite side of the Arabian desert twenty years before Pasolini set his camera on the Yemeni soil to film The Walls of Sana‘a) won the $100,000 Pritzker Prize in 2004 – the first female ever to win America’s most prestigious architecture award – the judges said she would have been famous if she’d never built a thing. (In 2010, she was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize for MAXXI – National Museum of the 21st Century Arts in Rome. Hadid got this prize again last year).
You can go almost anywhere — Azerbaijan (where Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center officially opened on 10 May 2012. Located close to the city center, the site plays a pivotal role in the redevelopment of Baku.), Singapore, Abu Dhabi, South Korea, Italy, China, Libya or Turkey — and expect to find a building designed by Hadid, a project for one under way, or a master plan in progress. Last year in Libya, Hadid’s new conference center outside of Tripoli was “put on hold.” As a result of the unforseen Arab Spring events in North Africa, Zaha Hadid Architects made a quarter of its staff redundant, laying off more than 90 employees.
MAXXI – National Museum of the 21st Century Arts in Rome by Zaha Hadid
One of the Pritzker judges, the veteran American architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, said that Hadid “has changed the way we see and experience space.” Hadid takes space in her hands and kneads it like dough, or slices it up like freshly prepared vegetables. Floors swoop, walls lean, ceilings fly away, outside and inside get all mixed up. Your expectations are confounded.
Hallway of Guangzhou Opera House in China by Zaha hadid (image courtesy of Roy Zhuang)
Hadid’s father Mohammed, a leading businessman and social democrat, was involved in industrialising Iraq during the period when oil revenues were pouring into the country’s coffers. After the rise of Saddam Hussein and the Iran-Iraq war, most of the professional classes, including her family, quit the country.
Hadid has lived in London since 1972, when she arrived from her native Baghdad, by way of a mathematics degree at the American University in Beirut. “I always loved London. My father went to school in England in the 1930s. I went to an English boarding school for a while. My brothers were at school in England, so I spent my summers in London while I was growing up,” explained Hadid in an interview for the British Airways High Life in-flight magazine.
Reflecting on her teachers, she said, “You had to be smart enough to chase them, and make them teach you. You had to learn what you wanted to learn.” Her mentor at the architectural association was the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who is now also a global superstar. (“Rem can sleep on planes,” says Zaha enviously. He likes flying. I don’t.”) (See Why I am excited about flying through Dubai or Why I am excited not to fly through OR Tambo in Jozi)
Baghdad, the second largest city in Western Asia (after Tehran) first introduced Zaha Hadid to the idea of architecture
Notwithstanding its notoriety, Lagos continues to have enormous appeal for vast numbers of people. Every hour, 21 new inhabitants set out to start a life in the city, a life that is highly unpredictable and requires risk-taking, networking and improvisation as essential strategies for survival.
A documentary Lagos/Koolhaas follows Rem Koolhaas during his research in Lagos over a period of two years. Using small digital cameras, film-makers documented Koolhaas documenting Lagos. They tried to grasp and convey a sense of the new urban life that is being invented in this Nigerian megapolis.
Koolhaas’ father was a novelist, critic, and screenwriter. Two documentary films by Bert Haanstra for which his father wrote the scenarios were nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, one won a Golden Bear for Short Film.
His father strongly supported the Indonesian cause for autonomy from the colonial Dutch in his writing. When the war of independence was won, he was invited over to run a cultural programme for three years and the family moved to Jakarta in 1952. “It was a very important age for me,” Koolhaas recalls, “and I really lived as an Asian.”
CCTV Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas in Beijing
It was Zaha Hadid’s native Baghdad (the second largest city in Western Asia, after Tehran) that first introduced Koolhaas’ trainee to the idea of architecture. “I had thought about being an architect ever since I was 11,” she says. “There was a period in Iraq in the 1960s, when identity and architecture were connected. There was a new philosophy in the country, and new buildings expressed it. I can remember going to an exhibition about Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in Baghdad. He was designing an opera house and I was intrigued.”
Due to the 1958 collapse of the Hashemite monarchy, development of the project stopped, and it was never built. (What would the late Frank Lloyd Wright say of today’s Baghdad, after sanctions, and after war? To learn)
Baghdad Tower and communication center in downtown Baghdad
Iraq’s central bank was targeted by car bombers three years ago, and Hadid was commissioned to design a replacement.
Hadid lives in Clerkenwell (in the London Borough of Islington), but spends her summers in Istanbul, a city which she loves. (See Biosphere Connections by Star Alliance+UNESCO+National Geographic) Her work shows the same passionate intensity at every scale. Her ideas for the waterfront in Istanbul and Singapore will reshape entire cities, but she is also ready to design pavilions for Dior, shoes, cutlery, bags and door handles. It is possible, in short, to live entirely in a world designed by Zaha.
Women do not get to build skyscrapers and opera houses by being shy and retiring. Don’t call her a diva: “Nobody calls Norman Foster or Frank Gehry a diva.”
this review by Steppes in Sync founder Andy Kozlov appeared in the March 2012 issue Hello Harare!
In Zimbabwe, Coca-Cola Africa, in cooperation with Population Services International, uses its extensive delivery networks to help distribute condoms to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic (image courtesy of www.utexas.edu).
When Vijay Mahajan‘s marketing-focused travelogue of Africa hit the shelves of American brick boxes of chain bookstores in 2009, Africa was indeed rising. And already then the author, whose name is immortalized in the name of an American Marketing Association award for career contributions to marketing strategy, had to apologize in the very first lines of the preface for overlooking Africa in the years preceding his 250-plus-paged revelation of ‘how 900 million African consumers offer more than you think.’
I could now go into saying that we, living in Africa, know that those proverbial 900 million African consumers can offer a lot. And some of us knew it well before Mahajan, an Indian-American, embarked on his ‘consumer safari’ (this is what Unilever executives that the author met in Harare back in 2008 call their initiatives to spend a day with consumers in their homes to understand how they use products). But I won’t go into all that.
I bought my copy of Africa Rising last year, when many of its predictions had probably been proved wrong, at a bookstore at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport . The book’s cover is less than attractive. So, why did I cash out almost 260 rand for the ‘outdated’ volume? What I was looking for is a human face to all those numbers trumpeting from every corner that Africa is rising.
You can flood me s much as you want with stats showing how we all in Africa have progressed in the last five years, but until I start seeing real people attached to your numbers, I won’t even begin connecting the dots. And Mahajan’s does a great job in bringing together the bread bakers of Zimbabwe and the film lovers of Nigeria, dropping examples of water East African purifiers in between.
Africa Rising offers an unprecedented account of the continent that even in 2012 can be rivaled by the few of its kind. Reading this book, one gets a new mindset that, with some training, pays off by making the reader see an immense pool of opportunities in the potholed roads, blackouts and chronic disease.
Vijay Mahajan (image courtesy of www.utexas.edu)
Despite its crusade-like mission of opening the world’s eyes on the business opportunities in Africa, Mahajan’s book stays in touch with the reality and, like any other business-focused volume, is an easy read that one can process on a lazy Sunday afternoon, as well as a hectic kombi ride from NSSA to ‘College.’
Who knows, maybe reading the book while riding in a kombi will inspire you in a Newton-like manner to come up with a creative solution to Harare’s public transportation challenge.
You can write to Andy Kozlov on a.kozlov@steppesinsync.com
In the multi-polar interconnected world an aspiring diplomat no longer has to be drilled by a formal academic program. And the state that uses diplomat’s services will often abide with philosophies different from her own countries.
It could. in fact, be a supra state like the EU. Or consider the work done by an UN citizen ambassador. Or if one were to find this position too symbolical than how about putting on a hat of a freelance diplomat? There are provisions specifically included in the articles of Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which allows a non-national to represent another country diplomatically.
According to Wikipedia, freelance diplomacy is a form of self-financing diplomatic representation used by countries who as a general rule, could not afford to hire expert diplomatic consultants full time. A freelance diplomat is hired for a specific task or may sometimes be contracted on a permanent basis to run a Delegation, Mission or Embassy. They may also be used to promote investment into the country they work for. It is understood to be a performance-based relationship, where the diplomat is paid on results only.
It would be interesting to note that some intellectuals put diplomats (statesmen) close to artists. Especially when we are talking about the Western civilization. John W. O’Malley, in his book Four Cultures of the West, describes the prophetic, academic/professional, humanistic, and artistic cultures all as being part of larger Western philosophy. He puts statesmen in “culture three” (humanistic) because they are concerned with contingencies. O’Malley says a statesman must ask: “Is war required of us now, under these circumstances?” A statesman argues, therefore, from:
probabilities to attain a solution not certain but more likely of success than its alternatives. Like the poet, then, the statesman deals with ambiguities, very unlike the protagonist from culture two, who traditionally argued from principles to attain truth certain and proved to be such; cultures two and three represent, thus, two different approaches to problem solving. Like the prophet of culture one, the statesman of culture three wants to change society for the better, but to do so he seeks common ground and knows that to attain his end he must be astute in compromise. He does not shun the negotiating table.
And, let’s face it, to be a freelance diplomat, one needs creativity. The same principle applies to small states that often use the services of freelance diplomats.
The more adept small states have managed to join bodies, regional or global, and maneuver to promote their interests within frameworks established by and for larger powers.
A Founding Partner of the Centre for Small State Studies at the University of Iceland Michael Corgan writes:
The Papal Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, gives Communion in the hand to Senator John Kerry, 2006 (image courtesy of traditioninaction.org)
And the 1962 Vienna Diplomatic convention includes the designation nuncio as co-equal to ambassador, in part a recognition of the centuries-long role played by the Holy See’s diplomats and diplomatic practice. In more modern times some small states, notably Switzerland and the Nordic countries, have shown how a focused and well-informed diplomacy can produce remarkable results, especially when vital economic or security interests are involved.
One of the first major decisions of the UN’s International Court of Justice was the 1951 Anglo-Norwegian Fisheries Case. Although this in itself could be considered a victory for a small state on the world stage, it was an even smaller state, one only 7 years independent, that seems to have made the most of the decision. Iceland’s government immediately saw a trend in world affairs and notions of sovereignty and promptly extended its own fisheries limits from 4 out to 12 miles. Nor were the Icelanders finished yet. Over the next quarter of a century this smallest of the small states that had chosen to join the world’s major bodies aggressively and progressively led the way in extending protected fisheries limits out to the now universally accepted 200 miles.
Iceland accomplished its aims against the efforts of much more powerful states, notably the UK and later Germany as well, taking advantage of several factors such as its geo-strategic value to NATO and clever use of media characterizations of a David versus Goliath. The principal asset this state—with fewer than a quarter million people—took into its three so-called Cod Wars, however, was the skill, persistence, and thorough grounding in facts of the issues of its diplomatic corps.
Nor is it only Northern European small states that have had an impact on events out of all proportion to their size. It was a Maltese UN diplomat, Arvid Pardo, who introduced the concept of the “common heritage of mankind” into the Law of the Sea section dealing with rights to resources on the deep seabed. This idea, which looked to the interests of all small states, was extended into the Law of Space where the sharing of data includes micro-states with no hope of themselves participating in any space exploration.
Though the idea of an International Criminal court had been talked of for some decades after the UN’s establishment, the spur for the effort that actually led to the Court’s establishment was begun by Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1990s as a way to deal with drug traffickers.
Born and educated in England, Colin Evans (born 1964) is widely considered to be the best example of a “freelance” or Commercial Diplomat in the world today. He is a fluent English and Portuguese speaker. He has represented countries from Africa, Central America and the Pacific and is often hired as strategic consultant to delegations at the FAO and UNESCO.
Freelance diplomats are often presented with diplomatic credentials and other documentation to facilitate their work, including diplomatic passports and CD license plates.
The nonprofit group, comprised of former diplomats from a variety of nations, stands ready to help would-be governments navigate the complex system of national bureaucracies and international organizations designed to accommodate established nations.
”Very often government or international officials will refuse to talk to our clients, or if they talk to them they’re reluctant to give them the information they need,” said Nicholas Whyte, who heads the Brussels office of the nonprofit group.
”And from our clients’ side, they are often inexperienced in dealing with international bureaucracies precisely because nobody talks to them,” said Whyte, an Irish international affairs expert.
ID’s projects have included: helping Kosovo achieve recognition as a new state, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, Somaliland, Northern Cyprus and Western Sahara.
ID has also assisted various non-profit organizations, including: Human Rights First, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Nicholas Whyte heads the Brussels office of the Independent Diplomat
The group also counsels established nations on issues where they lack expertise, including advising the Republic of the Marshall Islands on the U.N. climate change process and working with East European countries applying for EU membership.
Independent Diplomat adheres to a strict policy of rejecting clients engaged in armed struggle.
But critics say ID can only accomplish so much without involving governments and should not pretend to have more influence than they do.
Robert Cooper, the former secretary-general of the European Council in Brussels, also questioned the group’s influence. ”Achieving anything in foreign affairs is very difficult for non-governmental groups,” he said. ”Some NGOs perform extremely valuable work and are well respected … but in the end nothing is achieved without governments [and] they should not pretend that they have influence when they don’t.”
Still, Richard Dalton, the former British ambassador to Iran, said those involved in the endeavor were ”individually capable people” who could make a difference. ”Their philosophy and their code — and the approach that they take — does fill a gap for countries and for movements who don’t have access to the international system,” he said.
With offices in New York, Washington, London, Brussels and Addis Abeba the organization provides its clients with guidance on how to approach foreign governments or international organizations such as the United Nations or the European Union.
Independent Diplomat’s annual budget comes from foundation and government donations, as well as client fees. Clients are charged according to their ability to pay, with the poorest paying only nominal amounts.
AK: What do you expect from HIFA this year?
