A life travelling the path of peace

Since stepping down as UN assistant secretary general in 1998, Denis Halliday has never been busier and remains a passionate campaigner for human rights, writes LORNA SIGGINS

IT’S NOT EASY at the best of times to stand up in front of a group of children – let alone, a thousand of them – and tell them that you think some of their recreational activities just aren’t fun.

Yet such is the impact that former UN assistant secretary general Denis Halliday tends to have in a room that at least several hundred of the school pupils he spoke to may now be questioning their own interest in video games.

The venue for the soft-spoken Dubliner’s talk was one of the Cempaka schools in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, founded by a colleague of Halliday’s who he knew at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD).

“I suggested to the children that they think twice before playing games of death and mindless destruction,” Halliday explains, speaking on his return Galway. “Manufacture of such junk should be stopped, as it sadly diminishes the value of life.”

And Halliday would know more than a bit about the reality behind the fantasy created by Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2, the new “combat game” (with an 18 rating in Ireland), which attracted much media coverage for “breaking all records” sales. Such a slavish media response is anathema to Halliday’s philosophy, as a Quaker and senior diplomat who has spent much of his life in war-torn regions.

It is also anathema to the philosophy of Perdana, the Malaysian-based global peace movement of which he is an international adviser. For, since he resigned his post as UN assistant secretary general 11 years ago, Halliday has never been busier on issues relating to justice and human rights, and is involved with 15 international and Irish NGOs moving between his home bases in New York and Errislannan, Clifden, Co Galway.

Just last month, Halliday participated in a war crimes commission and tribunal, organised by Perdana in Kuala Lumpur. Victims of the Iraqi conflict, along with three detainees from Guantanamo Bay attended the commission hearings in late October.

Moazzam Begg, who was one of nine British citizens held and eventually released without charge in January 2005, and Sami Al’ Haij, Sudanese journalist for Al-Jazeera, described the suffering they and others have been subjected to, and the impact of various forms of water and electric shock torture.

“I could not have survived what they had to live through,” Halliday tells The Irish Times. “In the case of all the Guantanamo detainees, it was their faith which kept them going, when they had nothing else.”

As it states in its own literature, the war crimes commission is “a tribunal of conscience”, formed by the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War (KLFCW), which was established in March 2007. That in turn is a development of a global peace forum held in 2005 as part of the Perdana movement. The driving force for both has been Dr Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia for 20 years, and serving as education minister when Halliday first met him during his time in the UN.

SUPPORTED BY FORMERUS presidential candidate, peace activist and Green Party member Cynthia McKinney, British MP George Galloway and others, the tribunal and commission has a panel of judges – all who have served as high-ranking legal experts in England, India, Malaysia and north America. Though it does not bear the official stamp of the International Criminal Court at The Hague or the UN-backed international war crimes tribunal in Cambodia, it does "represent the international community's response to the occurrence of war crimes around the globe", it says.

Since such crimes are “more often than not committed by powerful states”, the chances of bringing criminals to The Hague are “very slim”, it explains. Its findings may be “merely declaratory”, it says, but a guilty verdict as a result of a trial before its court “publicises to the whole world that the individual, named as the accused, is now a war criminal”.

Halliday was a signatory to the Perdana peace declaration in 2005, by which time his passport was as well thumbed as it had been during his 34-year-long career in the UN. He had become the most senior Irish UN official – until the appointment of Mary Robinson as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1997 – when he quit his position as humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq.

After he announced his surprise decision to step down in mid-1998, the word in senior diplomatic circles was that both the US and Britain were glad to see him gone. As this newspaper reported at the time, UN sources confirmed that both member states had requested his removal earlier that year.

For his part, Halliday said he could no longer live with the moral conflict. He had been administering the “oil for food” programme, introduced in 1996/97 to assist the Iraqi people under economic sanctions imposed and sustained by the UN Security Council. He managed to increase the budget for the UN humanitarian programme for Iraq.

However, not only had Iraq’s capacity to produce oil been severely diminished, but the halving of the price for oil at the time had meant there was very little left to pay for the food and medicines required for 23 million people.

Halliday was profoundly affected by what he witnessed. As he told The Irish Times at the time, he obtained medicines in Jordan and Turkey for four children he had seen in a leukaemia ward at a hospital in Baghdad.

By the time he returned to visit the children with presents, two of them had died.

Halliday joined the UN in 1964, having served as a Quaker volunteer in Kenya in 1962-3. His first posting with the forerunner of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) was in Iran, and he subsequently worked in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, the south Pacific, and was regional representative in Thailand.

In 1981, he was asked to return to UN headquarters in New York, working in the Asia and Pacific Bureau, and was then appointed assistant secretary general for human resources management under former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali.

SINCE HIS RESIGNATION, he has consistently spoken out on Iraq, and returned several years afterwards with John Pilger for the BBC, and with RTÉ's Mick Peelo, for television documentaries. In 2000, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 2003 was presented with the Gandhi International Peace Award.

The flawed nature of the UN’s Security Council is an issue which he has explored through his involvement in the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, named after the UN secretary general who died in a plane crash in 1961, and through other peace and justice organisations, such as the Transnational Institute.

He is very active in the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons.

He is also associated with El Taller International, an NGO based in Tunis which holds courts for women where they can testify about experiences of violence; and he is associated with the Catholic Worker Movement, testifying in support of Mary Kelly, the Galway mother of four and anti-war activist convicted of damaging a US military plane at Shannon in January 2003.

At home, he is a supporter of the justice and peace organisation, Afri, which has aired residents’ concerns about the health and safety aspects of the Corrib gas project, and about policing of and security at same in north Mayo.

Last year, at an Afri Hedge School, he criticised methods used by the Garda to control protests, and said the failure by the Government to find settlement to the issue “disappoints”. He also applauded the “courage and commitment” of Rossport farmer Willie Corduff, after the assault he sustained at Glengad last April.

Halliday continues to lobby for reform of the UN Security Council – and will speak on this subject in Vancouver, Canada early next month. Much of his activity is self-financed but he says the remuneration for his academic work – he lectures at Trinity College’s peace studies programme, for instance – helps.

“One contributes what one can,” he says. “My contribution is my time.”

More information on The Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War is on criminalisewar.org