Sunday, Oct. 02, 2005

A Good Man To Have In A Crisis

By MARYANN BIRD

"I think we did stop a war recently in Somalia, and nobody noticed," says Gareth Evans, 61, president and CEO of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. That's classic Evans — brash and forceful — but it's exactly those qualities that ensure the NGO's voice is heard, and heeded, where it matters most: among the world's power brokers.

In July, the U.N. Security Council was set to consider an exemption to the arms embargo imposed on lawless Somalia in 1992, to allow a regional "peace support" operation to proceed in a country that has had no strong central government since civil war broke out in 1991. While that might sound like a step in the right direction, Crisis Group felt strongly that easing the embargo would derail the peace process and rekindle civil conflict.

An exemption would be "premature and counterproductive," argued Evans in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Security Council. "It would have been just an absolute recipe for disaster," says Evans, a former Foreign Minister of Australia. "With rapid-fire advocacy in the corridors of the U.N. and in the region, we turned that one around."

That's all part of the job of Crisis Group, which has been predicting and helping to resolve global conflicts since it was founded in London a decade ago. It believes that tensions need to be recognized early, before they explode into violence. Though Crisis Group is not exactly a household name, its leadership wields influence where it counts. Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong and a former European Commissioner, is the organization's chairman, and the executive committee includes financier George Soros, chairman of the Open Society Institute, and Emma Bonino of the European Parliament.

Crisis Group's reports go to policymakers and those who influence them worldwide. Annan reads them, says Evans, as do "governments with big minds of their own," like the U.S. The organization's track record includes issuing prescient, if ignored, warnings that conditions were not right for the 1996 elections in Bosnia; sounding alarm bells over Darfur and Kosovo; and encouraging early endgame proposals for Arab-Israeli peace.

"What we do is a long-haul process," says Evans. "We're not getting into a sexy conflict, getting all the parties into a room, then emerging with our arms aloft and getting the Nobel Prize." Perhaps not, but with more results like stemming the conflict in Somalia, the prizes cannot be far behind.