Session 7: IN CONVERSATION WITH CAROL BELLAMY

Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, discussed issues relating to broadcast coverage of children, focusing on education of girls, orphans, trafficking, child prostitution and child soldiers.

Session Chair: Ulla Terkelsen, Chief Foreign Correspondent, TV2 Denmark

Ulla Terkelsen: I'm very pleased to welcome Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF. Before the conversation takes place let's have a short look at Carol in action.

(runs tape)

Nice to see you and of course what we want to talk to you about and what the questions will be about are the interaction between your work and our work. But before that on a personal level a lot of us do similar work to what you're doing, travelling a lot, hectic lives, being bombarded with misery and we here in this circle get our salaries for translating that into visuals and then bombarding our viewers with misery. How do you cope with that? Do you become cynical? Does it excite you? Where do you get your energy from?

Carol Bellamy: Well I don't think we become cynical I think we wrap a little bit so that we are able to take these things in. I was looking at the pictures from the Ethiopian famine of so long ago and thinking to myself that we see many similar types of picture today. You told me that you were going to ask this question so I've had a little heads up but I still don't know the answer. I think we partly protect ourselves, we're only human, I work with some great people at UNICEF; also I'm a New Yorker and when I am home and I've been away frpm home then often one of the great things is seeing some of my New York friends because they all think that they are important too. I can go to dinner and say, 'wow I was just in Northern Uganda and that place!' And my friend will say, 'well I have to put my magazine out tomorrow'. And so I think that sometimes it's good to keep a little balance in your life so that you have something totally different in your life to allow you to deal with it.

Ulla Terkelsen: When you arrive at a trouble spot what do you look for and what touches you?

Carol Bellamy: Sometimes I find when I go to places, and go out to see some work in the field, I want to know if the people I am going with have any idea, if they have been there because we do a lot of work in health and immunisation and it's everything from sticking your hand into the refrigerator to make sure that it is on to asking whether they have a refrigerator or have electricity to whether the boxes of medicine are opened. I always like to look at the notebooks that the little kids have in the classroom to see if UNICEF was there the day before and just handed them out because I was coming the next day. Or whether the kids have written anything in the notebooks, it's just the small things sometimes.

Ulla Terkelsen: Let's come to the heavy stuff, how do you look upon us? Do you watch a lot of television? Do you see that misery? Do you think we present it properly and do you watch it?

Carol Bellamy: When I'm home I watch very little television although I have a bit of a routine I follow when I get to work early. First of all I turn on MTV early in the morning. I haven't got a clue what they are saying but I'm trying to be able, we deal with young people and we have some idea what is going on! If somebody says Beyonce I've got to know who she is. We are coming up in the world so we actually get BBC early in the morning in New York so I watch that. Then I fall back on my days of being in politics, I leave the television on but turn the sound off, usually leave the business channel on that goes back to my days of being a banker. So when I mostly see television interestingly for me is when I'm travelling not when I am at home and so I'd largely watch the news shows, SKY, CNN, BBC and FOX.

Ulla Terkelsen: That's very controversial in this circle!

Carol Bellamy: I'll give you a different order, if they've got FOX I want to see what they are saying on FOX frankly.

Ulla Terkelsen: Let sleeping Foxes lie. But how much do you watch of what we cover of your places, the emergencies you are dealing with?

Carol Bellamy: I don't see that that much, I don't

Ulla Terkelsen: Why not? Because you must be interested in how your organisation and its work is being presented to the world?

Carol Bellamy: Yeah I am I suppose I think I'll get feedback. If I watch and see there's UNICEF and there's a story, I guess I think that's great but I'm not going to get full coverage of a story just by seeing that, I'm going to get more feedback from hearing what other people think of it.

Ulla Terkelsen: But a lot of your work is making or catching attention for what you are doing? We would be insulted if we heard from you that what we are doing is not important! We are trying to tell the world about misery...

Carol Bellamy: Oh no, what you're doing is very important, I'm glad UNICEF has some stories but my view is if I look, if I turn on and I see, like when I turned on the television last night and our head of HIV and AIDS was giving a commentary on the study that was just done on the antibiotic and paediatric AIDS, that's terrific and I'm glad because that was a substantive story but if I just watch to see if UNICEF is being covered, I think I'm missing something there. We do need to get the stories on, we're the children's agency and when I tell people that they look at me like 'oh children, isn't that cute', and I try and explain to people we're 15,000 people in 158 countries, we're in all these countries and security is something that I spend much more time on today than ever before, the security of our staff and I want to get feedback but I also want some of these stories to get covered. Nobody covers northern Uganda, I think Northern Uganda is one of the worst humanitarian crises for children but it doesn't seem to be on anybody's agenda.

So I wasn't saying you don't play a role. When I started out in life as a lawyer, I used to think that tax lawyers ran the world, but I actually believe communications runs the world today. I fully believe that, I think that communications is changing, it's evolving. You know the business, I don't but I know that it's critical, it shapes decision makers. I say to UNICEF staff, even in the poorest countries, 'don't forget television because at least the ministers are watching television, we need to influence those ministers'. So I care and we care very much, but it's not just looking at television to see whether we are getting the stories.

Ulla Terkelsen: You say children, aren't children cute. Where's the borderline between increasing compassion towards the people you are there to help, and exploitation of them?

Carol Bellamy: I think exploitation is something that has to be kept in mind. I think the substance of whatever the story is, is the critical component. I'm not sure who's going to sit in judgement on whether it's exploitation or not. I think it's talking to kids - if you want real, straight answers sometimes, talk to kids! If you don't want a lot of BS, or meandering, or diplomacy, talk to kids. I think one can find out that way. But I don't think it's only sad stories with kids, I think there's a lot of really interesting things around the world going on with kids. Think about the population of the world, if you think about developing countries today, developing countries virtually, with only rare exceptions, virtually half the population of the world today is 18 or below. They're the future workers, the future consumers, the future investors or the future disenchanted on the other hand.

Ulla Terkelsen: If you look back at your ten years, you've been fighting to give children rights, rather than UNICEF just being an organisation highlighting their needs. What have you achieved, and where have you achieved nothing? What are your victories, how would you judge that?

Carol Bellamy: Well at least we've moved beyond people saying that if you want child rights, you're against child health, which was some of the thinking in the beginning. And we're not arguing about looking at child rights as some sort of soap box, finger waving. Children shouldn't be seen as some sort of charity but rather as human beings with a right to health, a right to education, a right not to be exploited, a right to make fools of themselves! A right to play. I think we talk a lot in the UN about human rights, I think on balance within the UN framework UNICEF has been able to move that agenda forward. We're not there by any means and certainly children's rights aren't being recognised everywhere and probably there are a bunch of UNICEF people out there thinking 'oh my God, I don't know what that Exec Director wants me to do but I'll say I'm doing it because it'll make her happy' but I think on balance, we've moved the agenda forward.

Ulla Terkelsen: There's been an election in your country.

Carol Bellamy: I noticed! I'm one of those fringey, blue state persons!

Ulla Terkelsen: Well how do you see Mr Bush in relation to your organisation because it's always being written that he doesn't like the UN and that he doesn't like international organisations.

Carol Bellamy: I actually think that's a complicated issue. This administration, interestingly, will probably have the largest foreign aid budget that's been seen in a long time although on a per capita basis it still doesn't look like anything like the Nordics do. But the additional money they're putting into HIV and AIDS, the millennium challenge account, there's a significant increase in foreign assistance. Clearly, some of it is very targeted. Obviously, well I shouldn't say obviously, but Iraq, Afghanistan. Not entirely but the HIV and AIDS money is targeted at a variety of other states. There's some biases in there, some of which we feel very strongly about. The bias in the HIV/AIDS money for just purchasing ARVs from US manufacturers is something we don't agree with. We think that if the purchasers of the ARVs meet WTO standards the same as they do in vaccines, we ought to be able to purchase them.

But nevertheless, this is an administration very suspicious of multi-lateral organisations as you can see with the UN but it has increased it's foreign aid budget. Largely through NGOs, but it has increased it. Secondly, it still remains by far the largest government contributor to the World Food Programme, more than 50%. It's the largest government contributor to UNICEF, not 50%, it's about 20% but it's still number one. I think it is number one to the refugee agency at this point. So, in direct contributions, and there hasn't been an attempt I should say in those three agencies, it clearly made the total across the board cut for the population agency, again something that's quite unfortunate. So from that perspective it's interesting, the US at least up until this point is engaged. I'll make a comment that I think the Bush administration will have a potential impact and that is that it is likely that in the next year both the position of Executive Director of UNICEF, which is mine, and the position of President of the World Bank will be changed and it's likely, although not guaranteed, that the World Bank position will be an American and it could very well be that mine is an American so an interesting way that the Bush administration could influence our work in the humanitarian area is if the recommenders of the heads of these two organisations could have a very significant influence.

Ulla Terkelsen: Ok I would like to open the debate now and there's a question over there. Nancy, who is from NBC in Paris?

Nancy Ing-Duclos: Thank you very much. Thank you for being with us Miss Bellamy.

Carol Bellamy: Please, call me Carol...

Nancy Ing-Duclos: Thank you. Carol, by the time that news organisations start to recognise that there are very important stories in parts of the world that we don't generally visit, we often turn to NGO's, agencies like yours for help in getting into those countries. We turn to you for contacts, resources, logistics, how to get there, how to be fed. Do you welcome us joining your teams going in or are we a burden to you? Do you have tips on how best to work together when we're in the field?

Carol Bellamy: I gather that's going to be part of the discussion in the next section. I think it's much less a problem for us and for the NGOs. Well, number one I don't think it's a problem but it's worth discussing because increasingly...the fact is it's happening. We're generally there before the crisis starts, during the crisis and after. It doesn't mean that we know everything, we and our partners, the NGOs and other UN agencies on the ground. We want to help because in the long run it will help us, frankly. And secondly the more attention we can get to stories the better. This makes UNICEF a little different to some of the other agencies because as some of you will know, we don't get all our funding from Government as other agencies do, we are voluntary funded so we have to go out each year and raise a third of our budget which was about $400m last year from non governmental sources, from private sector sources, so our fundraising arms, our national committees who also do some advocacy, they need to see some visibility of UNICEF so it's important to us. So I think we welcome, it doesn't have to be reciprocal, we welcome the opportunity to provide information. I was in North Korea earlier this year, we weren't able to get approval to take journalists in but we did try to get it. So for us at least and for some of our colleagues, like at World Food I think we're happy to provide the information and much more prepared to provide it to you than to be partisan, and there I think the media have to take enormous care but for us there's no problem.

Ulla Terkelsen: Nancy?

Nancy Ing-Duclos: You talked about communication being important and reaching out to the media. I was wondering if you encourage your staff to promote stories to catch the attention of the media because there's so many stories we feel like we're missing or we're not conscious of or we're ignoring so do you feel like you encourage your staff or is there a section or a communications department that looks for stories that might interest the media?

Carol Bellamy: We aggressively do that and are trying to do it in the area of real substantive stories rather than just 'say look at UNICEF, aren't we great' but real stories and now we are also going to start doing something, well I guess it's started, called UNIFEED where we're going to be working to provide daily feeds not only to brief on stories that UNICEF would be putting out but also other partners and UN agencies so that we're going to be trying to provide more information. We're trying, I don't know if anybody's looked it up but on our web page, compared to 6 months or a year ago we have many more video clips and bits of stories that might be useful, whether they involve UNICEF or not, but stories involving kids. So yes, we're trying very much to, in part because it's a noisier world out there, the attention is so much on Iraq at this point, there's so little focus on anything else. Nobody cares, we barely hear, about Afghanistan anymore, not that it should just be Afghanistan but when was the last time anybody talked about it? Or Nepal, or Liberia, or as I said, North Korea? So the answer is yes if you want to cross the border and I would be willing to give anybody who wants information on this UNIFEED information later.

Milica Pesic (Media Diversity Institute): If I can update you European MTV had an awards ceremony last night and most of the awards were taken by American pop bands.

Carol Bellamy: I thought you were going to ask me the name of one, I would have been lost!

Milica Pesic: I heard this morning on the BBC that a drug has been developed for children suffering with AIDS, what is your opinion on that? My second question is, trafficking in human beings, street kids and child prostitution, in the countries where MDI is working this is a serious problem and I assume we will be talking about this this afternoon when we talk about corruption. In Indonesia for example there are hundreds of thousands of street kids and the percentage of child prostitutes is very high as well; can UNICEF do more to get these children back home and help them to stay there because often they get back to the streets simply because it's the only source of income for the families. And then in relation to sex trafficking in South East Europe once many of these women are returned home they return to the streets for the same reason - what can UNICEF do? And lastly where the political establishment is really old what can you do?

Carol Bellamy: Again the BBC was running the story this morning and they identified Hilary Benn as a UNICEF staff member, I hope he won't take it out of our contribution! This is a recent study so I don't know all the details yet but it is in essence an antibiotic and it can strengthen the immune system of the child and potentially the baby, and it can decrease the possibility of transmitting the disease from the pregnant woman who's infected. You can't make AIDS go away but you can reduce the transmission and for younger children I am told who are infected, it's not a cure for AIDS but it can strengthen their system and help them live longer and reduce the amount of paediatric AIDS deaths. That's my understanding and clearly we should see what we can do about more widespread distribution. It seems to me that in conjunction with immunisation campaigns where we are reaching out and reaching large numbers of kids and certainly in the more heavily infected areas it's something we should be doing a lot more. These are recent results it's not like they've been sitting around on a shelf and nobody's been doing anything. On the last part were you suggesting where governments are involved?

Milica Pesic: Or members of governments.

Carol Bellamy: Trafficking is rooted in economics and it's run by big business. In most cases it's not the auntie who's sending the little girl off from the mountain in Nepal down to the capital in India because she thinks she's going to get a better job, or the woman who's going from Benin city in Nigeria to Italy, there's big business behind this, crooked business they're corrupt people. It really requires a broad approach, it requires law enforcement, it requires recognising this and it also requires better economic conditions. One of the reasons you've had so much trafficking in young women from Moldova and Albania and places like that is because the economic conditions are so bad and the woman thinks her only choice is to sell her body for sex. But with all of these issues the first thing you have to do is show the spotlight so again, you all play an enormous role in this, in getting more attention to the issue in the first place because these sensitive issues can be swept under the carpet the less pressure there is on governments to do anything, so just calling attention to it is important in the first place. So we as an agency can try and do that but this is an area where media can play a very important role. Secondly it's the extent to which we support systems to try and keep kids in schools. School is still in the long run the best approach to dealing with these exploitative issues. If kids get an education they at least generally have some kind of opportunity. I think naming and shaming has to be part of it sometimes, and I think this is something we can do and media can do sometimes is point out if there's some kind of government context and this is something that we, not just UNICEF but NGOs and all who work in this field would be glad to provide assistance for you to do your work because unfortunately the issue of trafficking for different reasons whether it's sex or cheap labour or coming over to the cocoa fields in west Africa or tourism, all of these are areas where unless you show the spotlight in the first place, you have almost no shot at making it stop.

Will Wright, General Manager of HD News: I'm a New Yorker and I wanted to tell you I voted for you and thank you for your service to me and my family as a member of the City Council but more importantly my organisation wanted to cover the tragedy of Haiti brought on by the latest spate of hurricanes that hit, but we couldn't get in. It was the UN that referred us to your office and this is a thank you note to say that we went in to Haiti which was devastated by two hurricanes that hit back to back and your organisation took such good care of my crew and the reason why I want to bring this up is because we've had no foreign experience, we're a new organisation with a young crew, first time in a foreign country and first time covering something this devastating. I believe that good organisations manage from on high and it trickles down and the people who work for you and helped us were just incredible. We were talking earlier about how you would assist journalists and I just thought I'd bring this up as a practical example that you actually mean what you say, and I thank you.

(applause)

Carol Bellamy: Thank you. That's very nice of you. Those too are communications people. Can I tell one quick story? I went to ...... recently and found that our office had hired the best cameraperson to follow me around while I was there so she introduced herself when I got there and said 'you know my Dad' and I said 'oh I do? Who's your Dad?' Well her dad turned out to be the last person I had run against in an election! So I wasn't sure what the pictures were going to look like but she did a great job and furthermore I lost anyway so...!

Peter Verlinden: Flemish Public Broadcasting. I'm working mostly in central Africa, in Congoland and Burundi and you know of course that not all stories of NGOs are success stories. We as journalists working in these areas mostly we have the tendency not to bring the bad stories to the NGOs. I know for example about a UNICEF project about reintegrating child soldiers in the Congo which completely collapsed, which was not successful. How should we, as journalists, manage that? Because the more we are working with NGOs in the field, the more we have a tendency to be positive about them while in our enterprises with the political world, we are much more critical. What's your point of view?

Carol Bellamy: I only want to say, first of all, we're not an NGO although I have so much respect for them. My view is that that has to be your judgement call. This is going to sound crazy but I would feel terrible if, having said we will work with you, you then feel you can't bring a bad story to our attention. Yes we want to work with you, yes we want to be of assistance but if you see something that you really think...I mean look, I'm sure UNICEF screws up every day and if there really is something like the child soldier demobilisation that really fell on its face and you think this is a story, I would hope that the fact you've done some work with UNICEF doesn't stop you doing that story. That would be terrible I think, that's my view. I would invite you all to do bad stories as well! I hope that we can all still work together! I think you have to bring that to people's attention though - and bring it to our attention!

Rebecca Lipkin, ABC News Nightline: I'm wondering, how has the murder of Margaret Hassan and the kidnapping of aid workers in Afghanistan changed the way UNICEF thinks about its operations?

Carol Bellamy: If there are a couple of things that have changed during the ten years that I've been in UNICEF, one of them, and I don't just want to talk about Margaret although I will in just a second, one of them is that I worry immensely about this Afghanistan situation. The whole security situation for aid workers really. I mean you're out there but we're out there too! Sometimes before you! And as I remind our colleagues in the UN, we are largely out there before the peacekeepers are out there. Over the last several years, even before the august Baghdad bombing, the safety situation for development and humanitarian workers has been deteriorating for a variety of reasons. You've seen it out there, the nature of conflict is changing, the nature of war is changing. War is increasingly not between two countries but within a country, it's increasingly not fought by two military forces for the most part. You look at the Iraq pictures and you see people in uniform but mostly you're talking about one uniform group or maybe a rag tag uniformed group but very often they are multiple non-state parties, the tactics are largely not military, it's largely 'how do I hurt and do the most terrible things to my opponent' which is why we're seeing much more gender violence. Violence has always been around but we're seeing much more physical violence, the cutting of limbs, the indiscriminate laying of landmines, horrific gender violence and the victims of war today are largely civilians and you just have more and more of this kind of conflict around and more instability generally and more thuggery. It's all out there and our staff is out there too, not just UNICEF but humanitarian and development workers too. It's been getting worse and worse, we've seen it with Rotarians who were participating in a polio campaign in Angola a few years ago and were killed. We had a doctor who happened to be in the wrong place in an immunisation campaign this last year in Somalia and in Burundi and was murdered when some UN staff, who supposedly had guards, were taken going into an area to do an assessment. The guards ran away and two doctors, our fellow who was Chilean and a Dutch woman from World Food, were killed. So over the last few years, things have been getting worse. Sorry to go through this but I'm giving a lot more attention to security issues than ever before. When I came to UNICEF we had something called an operations centre, headed up by one professional - he was a retired colonel from the US armed services - and for our volunteers today we have a volunteers centre that opens 24-7 which is run now by a fellow who used to head up the hostage unit at Scotland Yard. We have professional people, everyone in UNICEF knows that at a moment's notice they can at least be in touch. Everybody has to go through training and we follow them very carefully. In conjunction with the UN there's now mandatory security training for everyone and then what's happened over the last couple of years with the Afghanistan and now the Iraq situation is something even more challenging for all of us. That is now the blurring of the lines between the political and the humanitarian and a desperate need for those of us in the development and humanitarian fields to get some humanitarian space back and an increasing recognition by our NGO partners that we are all in the same boat together and the problem of things like hearts and minds when the military take off their uniform and put on their dockers and flannel shirt and go off and do a nice little project in the community but they're still carrying their guns is putting many of us in the humanitarian development field very much at jeopardy. So now the most recent being just generally the chaos in Iraq, I mean we just had the brother and 9 family members of our senior driver in Iraq because we have mostly local staff in Iraq we don't have international staff, our local driver and his brother and 9 members of his family were just killed in crossfire so what worries me most about the situation in Afghanistan is that Iraq is just so terrible as it is and we all knew Margaret, we worked with her, she was a very important partner of UNICEF. I mean, she'd lived in Iraq for years, it's all been reported but what worries me about the Afghanistan situation is if we start seeing copycatting, that is really very worrisome. A senior colleague of mine said to me the other day you know I've worked in some dangerous situations but I've never worried about kidnapping. I think that the whole field of humanitarian assistance is really on the edge at this point, I mean we need to do our work and if we allow ourselves to be run out of one place, then somebody's going to try and run us out of somewhere else. So we can't go into a fortress mentality but it's a very serious situation, those two locations right now. I'm sorry to go on at such length but I want to give you some sense of the concerns among again, the larger and present NGOs and UN and Red Cross communities right now because of what's going on. We're hoping that the situation in Afghanistan will get resolved and we will not see copycatting from Iraq

Ulla Terkelsen: One very brief question from you, Jim.

Jim Bittermann: I would like to take the question of child workers, you brought it up yourself by giving us the example of child soldiers. I spent the first 15 years of my career covering Africa and I wonder if the question is as simple as is seen here in Europe with the European Union child workers. It has been outlawed and has brought changes to life here in Portugal and when I was a student, my neighbour family the children were helping by distributing newspapers and thereby keeping the economy ok in the family and I've seen in lots of places in the third world that children are among the breadwinners in the family, sometimes they are the only breadwinners in the family. In your opinion is it so fundamentally simple that you can always say it's a bad thing? Or where do we draw the line and could you give us some examples?

Ulla Terkelsen: Thank you Carol Bellamy for a very engaging, very intense and very exciting session, thank you very much, fantastic.

(applause)

Jim Gold: On behalf of all of us at News Exchange, thank you Carol, thank you Ulla for a wonderful session.