Recasting the UN

At the Model UN conference, TY students relished their roles as leaders of oppressive regimes, writes PETER McGUIRE

FEW PEOPLE are willing to stand up for the North Korean regime. This is a country where citizens’ private lives are watched by a tyrannical state, where the “Great Leader” Kim Jong-il is worshipped as a God-king, and where anybody who complains about their extreme poverty risks being taken away, along with members of their family, to a concentration camp.

And yet, last month, the girls of Tudor Hall in Oxford stood up and defended this oppressive regime. Meanwhile, their fellow schoolmates were speaking up in favour of Chinese state censorship and the Iranian nuclear programme. In the same building, a student from High School Rathgar was prepared to robustly defend Uganda’s right to imprison and execute gay people.

They were among more than 300 students from 18 schools in Ireland and the UK who gathered in Wesley College Dundrum for the third annual Model United Nations conference to debate and discuss global issues.

Different groups of students, including a large contingent from Transition Year, form delegations from more than 50 countries, including Ireland, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Nigeria, Spain, the United States, Jamaica, Australia, and Israel, represented at the conference.

The Tudor Hall students who represented Iran, China, Cuba, and North Korea were not afraid to take controversial stances or defend the seemingly indefensible. Christine Wallace, aged 15, stood for the North Korean state. “It’s not the nicest place to live, to put it mildly,” Christine says. “But it’s been really interesting to represent North Korea and get an insight into how the country works. You really have to get into character and believe in what you’re saying, so there’s a bit of acting involved. Later, we’re going to represent North Korea at the historical committee, and we’ll be defending our invasion of South Korea in the 1950s on the basis that we were protecting people.”

The MUN conference opened with a mock General Assembly, which faced an emergency created specifically for the conference. In a fictitious scenario, Israel had attacked a nuclear installation in Iran, killing hundreds. The Iranians, ably represented by the girls of Tudor Hall College in Oxford, shocked everybody by announcing that they had indeed been making nuclear weapons.

Alison Gamble led the team from Tudor Hall. “We picked these countries because they’re extremists, and it’s more interesting to argue for them,” she says. “We have played other countries, but it’s not as interesting.”

As the General Assembly broke up, some students moved to one of the six committees: Political, Health, Environment, Human Rights, Economic and Social and Historical. Others spent the morning at the Security Council or the Human Rights Council. Everything was structured as it would be at the real UN.

THE MODEL UN conference is run by a team of Transition and fifth-year students from Wesley, who organise everything: lights, sound, finding a guest speaker, and chairing debates. The team consists of approximately 20 secretaries, 16 chairs, 20 security guards, and light and sound engineers. In addition, the students from Wesley acted in such roles as UN Secretary General, Head of Chairs, Head of Secretariat, and Head of the Press Team.

Emma Hogg, a student at High School Rathgar, had some qualms about representing Uganda, whose bigoted and violent policies have been condemned by the international community. “Their view is that homosexuality is an abomination and has to be stomped out,” she explains. “We’re prepared to call for the death penalty for gay people and imprisonment of homosexuals. It’s definitely not my personal view at all, but we have to act within the country’s policy as it’s laid out.”

The day closed with the issue of Israel’s attack on Iran. “Debate was intense,” says Nathan Walsh, one of the many Wesley students involved in the day’s organisation. “There were claims and threats made by such countries as Iran and Palestine regarding their nuclear weaponry capacity, causing somewhat of a panic and an even more urgent need for a diplomatic solution to be reached. Demands were made as to what action the United Nations and other countries should take. Attempts at calm discussion were made but, as is almost to be expected, they became quite heated at times.”

Eventually, despite diplomatic efforts, a resolution was rejected, and the situation remained unresolved.

“As a whole, we felt that it was a very successful weekend and we enjoyed it thoroughly,” says Wesley’s Yvonne Corcoran. “We felt that debate was productive and that delegates worked hard to form alliances with other countries in order to find solutions to all of the issues debated during the Conference.”