Preventing Deadly Conflict

Final Report With Executive Summary

Carnegie Corporation of New York

1997

Appendix 5. About The Commissioners

David A. Hamburg, cochair of the Commission, is president emeritus of Carnegie Corporation of New York, having served as president of the Corporation from 1983 to 1997. In addition to holding academic posts at Stanford and Harvard universities, he has been president of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. He has also been president and chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Hamburg has served on the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and currently serves on the Defense Policy Board of the U.S. Department of Defense. He is also a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. He has long been concerned with the problems of human aggression and violence, especially with violence prevention and conflict resolution, and he is the author or coauthor of numerous publications on these subjects.

Cyrus R. Vance, cochair of the Commission, is a partner in the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Mr. Vance was U.S. secretary of state from 1977 to 1980 during the Carter administration. He was secretary of the army from 1962 to 1964 and deputy secretary of defense from 1964 to 1967. From 1991 to 1993 Mr. Vance served as personal envoy of the secretary-general of the United Nations in the Yugoslavia crisis and as UN cochairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (Lord Owen was the European Union cochairman of the conference). Mr. Vance was also personal envoy of the secretary-general in Nagorno-Karabakh and South Africa in 1992. He has been the secretary-general's personal envoy in the negotiations between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) from 1993 to the present. He has served as special representative of the U.S. president in civil disturbances in Detroit (1967), in the Cyprus crisis (1967), and in Korea (1968), and he was one of two U.S. negotiators at the Paris Peace Conference on Vietnam (1968-1969).

Gro Harlem Brundtland was the first woman prime minister of Norway, serving in that position three times: in 1981, from 1986 to 1989, and from 1990 to 1997. She has been a member of the Storting (parliament) since 1977 and was minister of the environment from 1974 to 1979. Mrs. Brundtland was leader of the Norwegian Labour Party from 1981 to 1992. She is first vice president of the Socialist International and was a member of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (the Palme Commission). From 1983 to 1987, she chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development, which produced the influential report, Our Common Future.

Virendra Dayal joined the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1965, and for the next 14 years he was involved in the management of operations to protect and assist refugees in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. In 1979 he was appointed director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in the offices of the secretary-general, and in 1982 Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar asked him to serve as his chef de cabinet, with the rank of under-secretary-general. He continued to serve in this capacity with both Pérez de Cuéllar and Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali until March 1992, when he retired. After his retirement, he assisted Boutros-Ghali in writing An Agenda for Peace, and in September 1992 the secretary-general sent him to South Africa as his personal envoy. Since October 1993, Mr. Dayal has been serving as a member of the National Human Rights Commission of India.

Gareth Evans is deputy leader of the opposition in the Australian Parliament. He was a minister for all 13 years of the Labour Government, most notably serving as Australian foreign minister from 1988 until the government's electoral defeat in March 1996. In 1989 Mr. Evans chaired the inaugural ministerial meeting to establish APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), and from 1989 to 1991 he played a leading role in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia. Mr. Evans also led the Australian government's Chemical Weapons Convention initiatives, and in 1995 was instrumental in establishing the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. Among his publications is the 1993 book, Cooperating for Peace, and the 1994 Foreign Policy article, "Cooperative Security and Intrastate Conflict," for which he won the 1995 Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order.

Alexander L. George is Graham H. Stuart Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Stanford University. A leading academic specialist on deterrence, crisis prevention and management, and coercive diplomacy, Dr. George came to Stanford in 1968 after 20 years at the Rand Corporation, where he had been head of the social science department. The most recent of his many scholarly publications are Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (1994) and Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice of Foreign Policy (1993). Deterrence in American Foreign Policy, which he coauthored with Richard Smoke, won the Bancroft Prize in 1975. In 1983 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Five-Year Prize Award.

Flora MacDonald, a former foreign minister of Canada, is a native of Nova Scotia. She served from 1972 to 1988 as member of parliament for Kingston and the Islands (Ontario), during which time she held three cabinet positions: secretary of state for external affairs, minister of employment and immigration, and minister of communications. In 1989 the secretary-general of the United Nations appointed her to the Eminent Persons' Group to study transnational corporations in South Africa. She was the chairperson of the International Development Research Center from 1992 to 1997. In 1993 Miss MacDonald was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Donald F. McHenry is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. As U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from 1979 to 1981, Ambassador McHenry was a member of President Jimmy Carter's cabinet. He had served as U.S. deputy representative to the UN Security Council from 1977 to 1979. He has represented the United States in a number of other international forums and was the U.S. negotiator on the question of Namibia. After ten years at the Department of State, he joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1973 as a project director in Humanitarian Policy Studies. He has taught at Southern Illinois, Howard, American, and Georgetown universities.

Olara A. Otunnu is UN Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict and president of the International Peace Academy, an independent, international institution affiliated with the United Nations and devoted to promoting peacemaking, preventive action, and peacekeeping in international and internal conflicts. Mr. Otunnu practiced and taught law before serving successively as a member of the Uganda Consultative Council (interim parliament), Uganda's permanent representative to the United Nations, and minister of foreign affairs. During his tenure at the UN, Mr. Otunnu served in various capacities, including president of the Security Council, chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights, chairman of the Contact Group on Global Negotiations, and vice president of the UN General Assembly. After the period in diplomacy and government, Mr. Otunnu returned to academia, conducting research and teaching in Paris, before assuming his present position. He is currently a member of the UN Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children and the Commission on Global Governance.

David Owen is a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, chancellor of Liverpool University, and chairman of Humanitas, a charitable organization that builds on the work of the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, of which he was a member from 1983 to 1986. From August 1992 to June 1995, he was the European Union cochairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (Cyrus Vance was the UN cochairman until 1993). Lord Owen was a member of the House of Commons from 1966 to 1992. During that time, under Labour governments, he served as Navy Minister, Health Minister, and Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. He cofounded the Social Democratic Party which he led from 1983 to 1990. He was a member of the Palme Commission from 1980 to 1989.

Shridath Ramphal, a former foreign minister of Guyana, was secretary general of the Commonwealth from 1975 to 1990. He is cochairman of the Commission on Global Governance, whose report, Our Global Neighborhood, was published in January 1995. He chairs the board of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm and the international steering committee of LEAD, the Leadership for Environment and Development program. Sir Shridath is a member of the council of the International Negotiation Network set up by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and of the board of Canada's International Development Research Center. He is also chancellor of the University of the West Indies and of the University of Warwick in England. In 1991 he was a special advisor to the secretary-general of the UN Conference on Environment and Development—the Earth Summit—for which he wrote the book, Our Country the Planet: Forging a Partnership for Survival.

Roald Z. Sagdeev is Distinguished Professor in the department of physics at the University of Maryland and director of the East-West Space Science Center. Professor Sagdeev, whose area of special interest is nonlinear physics and plasmas, is one of the world's leading physicists. He was director of the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences for 15 years and was former president Gorbachev's science advisor. In 1987-1988 he was chairman of the Committee of Soviet Scientists for Global Security. Professor Sagdeev was a people's deputy of the USSR Congress, roughly the equivalent of a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention. He has long been a strong and effective advocate of building bridges of understanding between the superpowers.

John D. Steinbruner is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 1978 to 1997 he was the director of the Foreign Policy Studies program there. His research has focused on problems of international security. Before joining Brookings, he held academic positions at Yale University, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among the most recent of his many books and monographs is A New Concept of Cooperative Security (1992); he is also a major contributor to Global Engagement: Cooperation and Security in the 21st Century (1994), which was edited by Jan Nolan, and he wrote on international security conditions in U.S.-Israeli Relations at the Crossroads (1996), edited by Gabriel Sheffer. His articles have appeared in such journals as Arms Control Today, Foreign Affairs, Politique Internationale, Soviet Economy, Daedalus, and Scientific American.

Brian Urquhart was scholar-in-residence in the Ford Foundation's International Affairs Program from 1986 to 1996. From 1939 to 1945 Sir Brian served in the British army in infantry and airborne units in North Africa and Europe. His UN career began with the birth of the institution itself—from 1945 to 1946 he was personal assistant to Gladwyn Jebb, the executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in London. He held many posts in his 40 years with the UN: he was personal assistant to Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general, for three and a half years, and from 1954 to 1971, during the tenure of Ralph J. Bunche, he served in various capacities in the Office of the Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, which dealt with peacekeeping and conflict control. In 1974 Sir Brian was appointed under-secretary-general for Special Political Affairs, a post he held until his retirement. As under-secretary-general, among his responsibilities was the direction of peacekeeping operations and negotiations in Cyprus, the Middle East, Namibia, and other conflict areas. The most recent of his many books are Ralph Bunche: An American Life (1993) and (with Erskine Childers) Renewing the United Nations System (1994) and A World in Need of Leadership (1996).

John C. Whitehead is chairman of AEA Investors, Inc., a special situation investment company. During the Reagan administration, Mr. Whitehead was U.S. deputy secretary of state, under George Shultz, from 1985 to 1989. Among his areas of special interest were relations with Eastern Europe and the United Nations. After service in the navy, he began his professional career in 1947 at Goldman Sachs & Co., where he remained for 38 years, becoming senior partner and cochairman in 1976; he retired from Goldman Sachs in late 1984. He is chairman of the board of many institutions, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the United Nations Association of the U.S.A., and the International Rescue Committee, and he is a former chairman of the Harvard Board of Overseers, the Asia Society, and the Brookings Institution.

Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan is the chairman of the board of trustees of the Aga Khan University and Hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. He retired from the Pakistan Army in 1971 after a long and distinguished career that began even before the establishment of Pakistan as an independent state. General Yaqub-Khan served as vice chief of the General Staff, commander Armoured Division, commandant of the Command and Staff College, and chief of the General Staff. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general as corps commander and commander, Eastern Zone, and governor of East Pakistan. After his retirement, he embarked on a career as a diplomat, first as ambassador to France (1972-1973 and 1980-1982), the United States (1973-1979), and the Soviet Union (1979-1980), and then as foreign minister for nearly nine years between 1982 and 1991, and again in 1996-1997, a post that he held under seven different governments. His career then shifted to the United Nations, where he was the special representative of the United Nations secretary-general for the Western Sahara from 1992 to 1997.

 

Special Advisors to the Commission

Arne Olav Brundtland is the director of Studies of Foreign and Security Policy and senior research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). He is also a syndicated columnist and professor of international affairs and Norwegian politics at the International Summer School of the University of Oslo. Previously he served as editor-in-chief of Internasjonal Politikk, coordinator of security studies at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and copresident of the First Euro-Asian Comparative Workshop on Soviet Seapower. He is widely published and has been a visiting scholar at research institutions in the United States, Russia, and the Nordic countries. Mr. Brundtland is a member of the steering board of the advisory council for arms control and disarmament of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Trilateral Commission. Mr. Brundtland received his Magister Artium degree in political science from the University of Oslo and began his specialization in arms control as a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

Herbert S. Okun is the U.S. member of the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board. He is a visiting lecturer on international law at Yale Law School. A career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1955 to 1991, he served as ambassador to the German Democratic Republic and to the United Nations. From 1991 to 1993 he served as deputy cochairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, and from 1993 to 1997 he was a mediator of the dispute between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.