Delegates’ Lounge

By Antonio Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Today, on World Refugee Day, I am joining southern Sudanese refugees as they return home from Uganda to begin rebuilding their lives after decades of conflict. Although largely unreported, with help from the UN, refugees are starting to return to southern Sudan from refugee camps in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic. Others are returning from exile in Libya and Egypt, as well as from other parts of Sudan itself.

by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif. 6) After criticizing past Presidents' foreign policy efforts as nothing more than "nation building" during his first campaign, President Bush promised the world a new American foreign policy once elected. Seven years later, we have seen the results of his approach - of his insistence on preemptive military strikes instead of diplomacy, of brash unilateral arrogance as opposed to respect for the international organizations. I am certainly not alone in recognizing the foreign policy of this Administration as nothing but a total and abject failure.

by John Prendergast and Julia Spiegel Since the conflict in Darfur erupted in early 2003, students, religious groups, politicians and concerned citizens around the world have spoken out to try and help bring an end to the suffering in Western Sudan. Sadly, Darfur continues to burn, but many of us who have worked for decades in African crisis zones have been deeply inspired and moved by this groundswell of support and action on behalf of the people of Darfur.

Long before Susan Rice was Obama's pick for UN Ambassador, she contributed this piece to UN Dispatch. Originally published May 31, 2007. by Susan Rice, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution When Americans see televised images of bone-thin African or Asian kids with distended bellies, what do we think? We think of helping. For all the right reasons, our humanitarian instincts tend to take over. But when we look at UNICEF footage or a Save the Children solicitation, does it also occur to us that we are seeing a symptom of a threat that could destroy our way of life? Rarely. In fact, global poverty is far more than solely a humanitarian concern. In real ways, over the long term, it can threaten U.S. national security.

Until the United Nations intervened in 2003, some 250,000 people lost their lives and as many as one million people were displaced or made refugees as a result of fourteen years of conflict in the small, West African country of Liberia. UN Dispatch recently contacted Jordan Ryan, an American citizen who is one of the top administrators of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). From his office in Monrovia, Mr. Ryan discusses the history of the conflict, reconstruction efforts, and how UN peacekeepers are contributing to the political and physical rehabilitation of a broken country.

On January 22, UN Dispatch reported that 105 Indian police officers where being deployed to Liberia as the UN's first all-female peacekeeping force. Today we sat down with a unit commander, Seema Dhundia, to check in on their progress.

In June 2006, the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Group Foundation formed a partnership to help fund the development of digital health data systems in Africa so local health care workers can access national health databases. This includes an initiative, admimnistered through the NGO DataDyne, to fund mobile computing devices for health care workers and data officers in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Zambia. In the post below, Dr. Joel Selanikio writes in from a clinic in Zambia to explain why cell phones and PDAs have become a critical tool in the development of national health data systems in the developing world.