[Marxism] "The Elders" Former Leaders Create Freelance Global Diplomatic Team (NYT)

[Walter Lippmann]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 18, 2007
Former Leaders Create Freelance Global Diplomatic Team
By MICHAEL WINES

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/world/africa/18safrica.html

JOHANNESBURG, July 17 — Melding serious statesmanship and a dose of
audacity, the former South African president, Nelson R. Mandela, and
a clutch of world-famous figures plan to announce on Wednesday a
private alliance to launch diplomatic assaults on the globe’s most
intractable problems.

The alliance, to be unveiled during events marking Mr. Mandela’s 89th
birthday, is to be called the Elders. Among others, it includes the
retired Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu; former President Jimmy
Carter; the former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan; and
the human-rights activist and former Irish president Mary Robinson.

Many, including Mr. Mandela, have been early and harsh critics of
President Bush and American foreign policy, particularly toward Iraq
and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group’s members and backers
insisted in interviews, however, that they were guided neither by
ideology nor by geopolitical bent.

Mr. Mandela, in remarks prepared for Wednesday, said that since
members no longer held public office, they could work solely for the
common good, not for outside interests.

“This group can speak freely and boldly, working both publicly and
behind the scenes on whatever actions need to be taken,” he wrote.
“Together we will work to support courage where there is fear, foster
agreement where there is conflict and inspire hope where there is
despair.”

Whether governments that become the objects of the Elders’ freelance
diplomacy would agree remains to be seen. One of the group’s founders
and principal financial backers, the British tycoon Richard Branson,
said leaders he had briefed — including Britain’s prime minister,
Gordon Brown, and South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki — “very much
support the initiative.”

“There will always be skeptics of any positive initiatives, but these
are people giving up their time for nothing,” Mr. Branson said. “Most
individuals in the world would welcome a group of people who are
above ego, who, in the last 12 or 15 years of their lives, are above
partisan politics.”

The Elders would not try to solve all the world’s problems, he said,
but would work “stone by stone” on those issues where they can do
some good.

At least one veteran crisis-solver, the former American secretary of
state Madeleine Albright, said the idea should not be dismissed.

“It’s worth having people with experience see what they can do,” Ms.
Albright, reached by telephone in Paris, said Tuesday. “So much of
diplomacy is having an outsider lay out what the issues are — having
a wider outside view.”

She added that having said that, much of diplomacy also requires the
weight of nations like the United States to succeed. “Whether these
people would be representing a country or themselves will make a
difference,” she said.

That may depend on the situation. The Elders may sometimes complement
the efforts of a government to solve a crisis, Mr. Annan said
Tuesday, but also may make what he called timely interventions when
official efforts have failed.

Asked how that differed from what United Nations diplomats were
supposed to do, Mr. Annan replied: “We are not out to defend the
positions of any institution or government. We’re ordinary global
citizens who want to help with the problems of the world.”

None of the problems the Elders will tackle have been selected.
Indeed, not all of the members, who will eventually number about a
dozen, have been chosen.

“The Elders won’t get involved in delivering bed nets for malaria
prevention,” Mr. Carter said. “The issue is to fill vacuums — to
address major issues that aren’t being adequately addressed.”

If the concept and the name seem a bit outsize — a diplomatic league
of superheroes, one might say — it may be because of the group’s ties
to Mr. Branson, a friend of Mr. Mandela who rarely does things in a
small way.

Mr. Branson said he began thinking about the notion in 2003, after he
sought to persuade Mr. Mandela and Mr. Annan to travel to Baghdad to
ask Saddam Hussein to relinquish power in Iraq. The two agreed, but
war broke out before arrangements were completed.

Later, after working on a concert for one of Mr. Mandela’s charities,
Mr. Branson flew home with Peter Gabriel, the British rock star and
human-rights activist. “I was talking about the need for a group of
global elders to be there to rally around in times of conflict,” he
said, “and Peter said he’d had a similar idea.”

Thus was born the Elders, named after the pre-eminence of elders in
African village societies. Over the past year or so, Mr. Branson held
a series of meetings at which members and backers were recruited.

The remaining announced members of the group are Graça Machel, Mr.
Mandela’s wife and a noted Mozambican human-rights activist; Muhammad
Yunus, the Bangladeshi who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his
work in extending loans to impoverished borrowers; Ela Bhatt, a
women’s trade union leader in India; and Li Zhaoxing, who was China’s
foreign minister until this year.

Mr. Branson and Mr. Gabriel contributed money to begin the project.
Asked how much it would cost, Mr. Branson replied, “Obviously, it’s
not cheap.” But enough donors have given money to finance the Elders’
first four years of work, he said, and he anticipated that raising
more would not be difficult.

“It’s an organization that’s set up to be there in a hundred years’
time,” he said.